Datasets:

FrancophonIA
/

Vikidia-EnFr

+Geometry (from the Ancient Greek: γεωμετρία; geo- "earth", -metron "measurement") is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space.[1] A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.
+Geometry arose independently in a number of early cultures as a practical way for dealing with lengths, areas, and volumes.[1] Geometry began to see elements of formal mathematical science emerging in Greek mathematics as early as the 6th century BC.[2] By the 3rd century BC, geometry was put into an axiomatic form by Euclid, whose treatment, The Elements, set a standard for many centuries to follow.[3] Geometry arose independently in India, with texts providing rules for geometric constructions appearing as early as the 3rd century BC.[4] Islamic scientists preserved Greek ideas and expanded on them during the Middle Ages.[5] By the early 17th century, geometry had been put on a solid analytic footing by mathematicians such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. Since then, and into modern times, geometry has expanded into non-Euclidean geometry and manifolds, describing spaces that lie beyond the normal range of human experience.[6]
+While geometry has evolved significantly throughout the years, there are some general concepts that are fundamental to geometry. These include the concepts of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as well as the more advanced notions of topology and manifold.[7]
+Geometry has applications to many fields, including art, architecture, physics, as well as to other branches of mathematics.[8]
+The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC.[9][10] Early geometry was a collection of empirically discovered principles concerning lengths, angles, areas, and volumes, which were developed to meet some practical need in surveying, construction, astronomy, and various crafts. The earliest known texts on geometry are the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus (2000–1800 BC) and Moscow Papyrus (c. 1890 BC), the Babylonian clay tablets such as Plimpton 322 (1900 BC). For example, the Moscow Papyrus gives a formula for calculating the volume of a truncated pyramid, or frustum.[11] Later clay tablets (350–50 BC) demonstrate that Babylonian astronomers implemented trapezoid procedures for computing Jupiter's position and motion within time-velocity space. These geometric procedures anticipated the Oxford Calculators, including the mean speed theorem, by 14 centuries.[12] South of Egypt the ancient Nubians established a system of geometry including early versions of sun clocks.[13][14]
+In the 7th century BC, the Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore.  He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' Theorem.[2] Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, which is credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem,[15]  though the statement of the theorem has a long history.[16][17] Eudoxus (408–c. 355 BC) developed the method of exhaustion, which allowed the calculation of areas and volumes of curvilinear figures,[18] as well as a theory of ratios that avoided the problem of incommensurable magnitudes, which enabled subsequent geometers to make significant advances. Around 300 BC, geometry was revolutionized by Euclid, whose Elements, widely considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time,[19] introduced mathematical rigor through the axiomatic method and is the earliest example of the format still used in mathematics today, that of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof. Although most of the contents of the Elements were already known, Euclid arranged them into a single, coherent logical framework.[20] The Elements was known to all educated people in the West until the middle of the 20th century and its contents are still taught in geometry classes today.[21] Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) of Syracuse used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave remarkably accurate approximations of Pi.[22] He also studied the spiral bearing his name and obtained formulas for the volumes of surfaces of revolution.
+Indian mathematicians also made many important contributions in geometry. The Satapatha Brahmana (3rd century BC) contains rules for ritual geometric constructions that are similar to the Sulba Sutras.[4] According to (Hayashi 2005, p. 363), the Śulba Sūtras contain "the earliest extant verbal expression of the Pythagorean Theorem in the world, although it had already been known to the Old Babylonians. They contain lists of Pythagorean triples,[23] which are particular cases of Diophantine equations.[24]
+In the Bakhshali manuscript, there is a handful of geometric problems (including problems about volumes of irregular solids). The Bakhshali manuscript also "employs a decimal place value system with a dot for zero."[25] Aryabhata's Aryabhatiya (499) includes the computation of areas and volumes.
+Brahmagupta wrote his astronomical work Brāhma Sphuṭa Siddhānta in 628. Chapter 12, containing 66 Sanskrit verses, was divided into two sections: "basic operations" (including cube roots, fractions, ratio and proportion, and barter) and "practical mathematics" (including mixture, mathematical series, plane figures, stacking bricks, sawing of timber, and piling of grain).[26] In the latter section, he stated his famous theorem on the diagonals of a cyclic quadrilateral. Chapter 12 also included a formula for the area of a cyclic quadrilateral (a generalization of Heron's formula), as well as a complete description of rational triangles (i.e. triangles with rational sides and rational areas).[26]
+In the Middle Ages, mathematics in medieval Islam contributed to the development of geometry, especially algebraic geometry.[27][28] Al-Mahani (b. 853) conceived the idea of reducing geometrical problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra.[29] Thābit ibn Qurra (known as Thebit in Latin) (836–901) dealt with arithmetic operations applied to ratios of geometrical quantities, and contributed to the development of analytic geometry.[5] Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) found geometric solutions to cubic equations.[30]  The theorems of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Omar Khayyam and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi on quadrilaterals, including the Lambert quadrilateral and Saccheri quadrilateral, were early results in hyperbolic geometry, and along with their alternative postulates, such as Playfair's axiom, these works had a considerable influence on the development of non-Euclidean geometry among later European geometers, including Witelo (c. 1230–c. 1314), Gersonides (1288–1344), Alfonso, John Wallis, and Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri.[31]
+In the early 17th century, there were two important developments in geometry. The first was the creation of analytic geometry, or geometry with coordinates and equations, by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665).[32] This was a necessary precursor to the development of calculus and a precise quantitative science of physics.[33] The second geometric development of this period was the systematic study of projective geometry by Girard Desargues (1591–1661).[34] Projective geometry studies properties of shapes which are unchanged under projections and sections, especially as they relate to artistic perspective.[35]
+Two developments in geometry in the 19th century changed the way it had been studied previously.[36] These were the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, János Bolyai and Carl Friedrich Gauss and of the formulation of symmetry as the central consideration in the Erlangen Programme of Felix Klein (which generalized the Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries). Two of the master geometers of the time were Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), working primarily with tools from mathematical analysis, and introducing the Riemann surface, and Henri Poincaré, the founder of algebraic topology and the geometric theory of dynamical systems. As a consequence of these major changes in the conception of geometry, the concept of "space" became something rich and varied, and the natural background for theories as different as complex analysis and classical mechanics.[37]
+The following are some of the most important concepts in geometry.[7][38][39]
+Euclid took an abstract approach to geometry in his Elements,[40] one of the most influential books ever written.[41] Euclid introduced certain axioms, or postulates, expressing primary or self-evident properties of points, lines, and planes.[42] He proceeded to rigorously deduce other properties by mathematical reasoning. The characteristic feature of Euclid's approach to geometry was its rigor, and it has come to be known as axiomatic or synthetic geometry.[43] At the start of the 19th century, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856), János Bolyai (1802–1860), Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and others[44] led to a revival of interest in this discipline, and in the 20th century, David Hilbert (1862–1943) employed axiomatic reasoning in an attempt to provide a modern foundation of geometry.[45]
+Points are considered fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry. They have been defined in a variety of ways, including Euclid's definition as 'that which has no part'[46] and through the use of algebra or nested sets.[47] In many areas of geometry, such as analytic geometry, differential geometry, and topology, all objects are considered to be built up from points. However, there has been some study of geometry without reference to points.[48]
+Euclid described a line as "breadthless length" which "lies equally with respect to the points on itself".[46] In modern mathematics, given the multitude of geometries, the concept of a line is closely tied to the way the geometry is described. For instance, in analytic geometry, a line in the plane is often defined as the set of points whose coordinates satisfy a given linear equation,[49] but in a more abstract setting, such as incidence geometry, a line may be an independent object, distinct from the set of points which lie on it.[50] In differential geometry, a geodesic is a generalization of the notion of a line to curved spaces.[51]
+A plane is a flat, two-dimensional surface that extends infinitely far.[46] Planes are used in every area of geometry. For instance, planes can be studied as a topological surface without reference to distances or angles;[52] it can be studied as an affine space, where collinearity and ratios can be studied but not distances;[53] it can be studied as the complex plane using techniques of complex analysis;[54] and so on.
+Euclid defines a plane angle as the inclination to each other, in a plane, of two lines which meet each other, and do not lie straight with respect to each other.[46] In modern terms, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle.[55]
+In Euclidean geometry, angles are used to study polygons and triangles, as well as forming an object of study in their own right.[46] The study of the angles of a triangle or of angles in a unit circle forms the basis of trigonometry.[56]
+In differential geometry and calculus, the angles between plane curves or space curves or surfaces can be calculated using the derivative.[57][58]
+A curve is a 1-dimensional object that may be straight (like a line) or not; curves in 2-dimensional space are called plane curves and those in 3-dimensional space are called space curves.[59]
+In topology, a curve is defined by a function from an interval of the real numbers to another space.[52] In differential geometry, the same definition is used, but the defining function is required to be differentiable [60] Algebraic geometry studies algebraic curves, which are defined as algebraic varieties of dimension one.[61]
+A surface is a two-dimensional object, such as a sphere or paraboloid.[62] In differential geometry[60] and topology,[52] surfaces are described by two-dimensional 'patches' (or neighborhoods) that are assembled by diffeomorphisms or homeomorphisms, respectively. In algebraic geometry, surfaces are described by polynomial equations.[61]
+A manifold is a generalization of the concepts of curve and surface. In topology, a manifold is a topological space where every point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to Euclidean space.[52] In differential geometry, a differentiable manifold is a space where each neighborhood is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space.[60]
+Manifolds are used extensively in physics, including in general relativity and string theory.[63]
+Length, area, and volume describe the size or extent of an object in one dimension, two dimension, and three dimensions respectively.[64]
+In Euclidean geometry and analytic geometry, the length of a line segment can often be calculated by the Pythagorean theorem.[65]
+Area and volume can be defined as fundamental quantities separate from length, or they can be described and calculated in terms of lengths in a plane or 3-dimensional space.[64] Mathematicians have found many explicit formulas for area and formulas for volume of various geometric objects. In calculus, area and volume can be defined in terms of integrals, such as the Riemann integral[66] or the Lebesgue integral.[67]
+The concept of length or distance can be generalized, leading to the idea of metrics.[68] For instance, the Euclidean metric measures the distance between points in the Euclidean plane, while the hyperbolic metric measures the distance in the hyperbolic plane. Other important examples of metrics include the Lorentz metric of special relativity and the semi-Riemannian metrics of general relativity.[69]
+In a different direction, the concepts of length, area and volume are extended by measure theory, which studies methods of assigning a size or measure to sets, where the measures follow rules similar to those of classical area and volume.[70]
+Congruence and similarity are concepts that describe when two shapes have similar characteristics.[71] In Euclidean geometry, similarity is used to describe objects that have the same shape, while congruence is used to describe objects that are the same in both size and shape.[72] Hilbert, in his work on creating a more rigorous foundation for geometry, treated congruence as an undefined term whose properties are defined by axioms.
+Congruence and similarity are generalized in transformation geometry, which studies the properties of geometric objects that are preserved by different kinds of transformations.[73]
+Classical geometers paid special attention to constructing geometric objects that had been described in some other way. Classically, the only instruments allowed in geometric constructions are the compass and straightedge. Also, every construction had to be complete in a finite number of steps. However, some problems turned out to be difficult or impossible to solve by these means alone, and ingenious constructions using parabolas and other curves, as well as mechanical devices, were found.
+Where the traditional geometry allowed dimensions 1 (a line), 2 (a plane) and 3 (our ambient world conceived of as three-dimensional space), mathematicians and physicists have used higher dimensions for nearly two centuries.[74] One example of a mathematical use for higher dimensions is the configuration space of a physical system, which has a dimension equal to the system's degrees of freedom. For instance, the configuration of a screw can be described by five coordinates.[75]
+In general topology, the concept of dimension has been extended from natural numbers, to infinite dimension (Hilbert spaces, for example) and  positive real numbers (in fractal geometry).[76] In algebraic geometry, the dimension of an algebraic variety has received a number of apparently different definitions, which are all equivalent in the most common cases.[77]
+The theme of symmetry in geometry is nearly as old as the science of geometry itself.[78] Symmetric shapes such as the circle, regular polygons and platonic solids held deep significance for many ancient philosophers[79] and were investigated in detail before the time of Euclid.[42] Symmetric patterns occur in nature and were artistically rendered in a multitude of forms, including the graphics of da Vinci, M.C. Escher, and others.[80] In the second half of the 19th century, the relationship between symmetry and geometry came under intense scrutiny. Felix Klein's Erlangen program proclaimed that, in a very precise sense, symmetry, expressed via the notion of a transformation group, determines what geometry is.[81] Symmetry in classical Euclidean geometry is represented by congruences and rigid motions, whereas in projective geometry an analogous role is played by collineations, geometric transformations that take straight lines into straight lines.[82] However it was in the new geometries of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, Riemann, Clifford and Klein, and Sophus Lie that Klein's idea to 'define a geometry via its symmetry group' found its inspiration.[83] Both discrete and continuous symmetries play prominent roles in geometry, the former in topology and geometric group theory,[84][85] the latter in Lie theory and Riemannian geometry.[86][87]
+A different type of symmetry is the principle of duality  in projective geometry, among other fields. This meta-phenomenon can roughly be described as follows: in any theorem, exchange point with plane, join with meet, lies in with contains, and the result is an equally true theorem.[88] A similar and closely related form of duality exists between a vector space and its dual space.[89]
+Euclidean geometry is geometry in its classical sense.[90] As it models the space of the physical world, it is used in many scientific areas, such as mechanics, astronomy, crystallography,[91] and many technical fields, such as engineering,[92] architecture,[93] geodesy,[94] aerodynamics,[95] and navigation.[96] The mandatory educational curriculum of the majority of nations includes the study of Euclidean concepts such as points, lines, planes, angles, triangles, congruence, similarity, solid figures, circles, and analytic geometry.[38]
+Differential geometry uses techniques of calculus and linear algebra to study problems in geometry.[97] It has applications in physics,[98] econometrics,[99] and bioinformatics,[100] among others.
+In particular, differential geometry is of importance to mathematical physics due to Albert Einstein's general relativity postulation that the universe is curved.[101] Differential geometry can either be intrinsic (meaning that the spaces it considers are smooth manifolds whose geometric structure is governed by a Riemannian metric, which determines how distances are measured near each point) or extrinsic (where the object under study is a part of some ambient flat Euclidean space).[102]
+Euclidean geometry was not the only historical form of geometry studied. Spherical geometry has long been used by astronomers, astrologers, and navigators.[103]
+Immanuel Kant argued that there is only one, absolute, geometry, which is known to be true a priori by an inner faculty of mind: Euclidean geometry was synthetic a priori.[104]  This view was at first somewhat challenged by thinkers such as Saccheri, then finally overturned by the revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the works of Bolyai, Lobachevsky, and Gauss (who never published his theory).[105] They demonstrated that ordinary Euclidean space is only one possibility for development of geometry. A broad vision of the subject of geometry was then expressed  by Riemann in his 1867 inauguration lecture Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (On the hypotheses on which geometry is based),[106] published only after his death. Riemann's new idea of space proved crucial in Albert Einstein's general relativity theory. Riemannian geometry, which considers very general spaces in which the notion of length is defined, is a mainstay of modern geometry.[83]
+Topology is the field concerned with the properties of continuous mappings,[107] and can be considered a generalization of Euclidean geometry.[108] In practice, topology often means dealing with large-scale properties of spaces, such as connectedness and compactness.[52]
+The field of topology, which saw massive development in the 20th century, is in a technical sense a type of transformation geometry, in which transformations are homeomorphisms.[109] This has often been expressed in the form of the saying 'topology is rubber-sheet geometry'. Subfields of topology include geometric topology, differential topology, algebraic topology and general topology.[110]
+The field of algebraic geometry developed from the Cartesian geometry of co-ordinates.[111] It underwent periodic periods of growth, accompanied by the creation and study of projective geometry, birational geometry, algebraic varieties, and commutative algebra, among other topics.[112] From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s it had undergone major foundational development, largely due to work of Jean-Pierre Serre and Alexander Grothendieck.[112] This led to the introduction of schemes and greater emphasis on topological methods, including various cohomology theories. One of seven Millennium Prize problems, the Hodge conjecture, is a question in algebraic geometry.[113] Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem uses advanced methods of algebraic geometry for solving a long-standing problem of number theory.
+In general, algebraic geometry studies geometry through the use of concepts in commutative algebra such as multivariate polynomials.[114] It has applications in many areas, including cryptography[115] and string theory.[116]
+Complex geometry studies the nature of geometric structures modelled on, or arising out of, the complex plane.[117][118][119] Complex geometry lies at the intersection of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and analysis of several complex variables, and has found applications to string theory and mirror symmetry.[120]
+Complex geometry first appeared as a distinct area of study in the work of Bernhard Riemann in his study of Riemann surfaces.[121][122][123] Work in the spirit of Riemann was carried out by the Italian school of algebraic geometry in the early 1900s. Contemporary treatment of complex geometry began with the work of Jean-Pierre Serre, who introduced the concept of sheaves to the subject, and illuminated the relations between complex geometry and algebraic geometry.[124][125]
+The primary objects of study in complex geometry are complex manifolds, complex algebraic varieties, and complex analytic varieties, and holomorphic vector bundles and coherent sheaves over these spaces. Special examples of spaces studied in complex geometry include Riemann surfaces, and Calabi-Yau manifolds, and these spaces find uses in string theory. In particular, worldsheets of strings are modelled by Riemann surfaces, and superstring theory predicts that the extra 6 dimensions of 10 dimensional spacetime may be modelled by Calabi-Yau manifolds.
+Discrete geometry is a subject that has close connections with convex geometry.[126][127][128] It is concerned mainly with questions of relative position of simple geometric objects, such as points, lines and circles. Examples include the study of sphere packings, triangulations, the Kneser-Poulsen conjecture, etc.[129][130] It shares many methods and principles with combinatorics.
+Computational geometry deals with algorithms and their implementations for manipulating geometrical objects. Important problems historically have included the travelling salesman problem, minimum spanning trees, hidden-line removal, and linear programming.[131]
+Although being a young area of geometry, it has many applications in computer vision, image processing, computer-aided design, medical imaging, etc.[132]
+Geometric group theory uses large-scale geometric techniques to study finitely generated groups.[133] It is closely connected to low-dimensional topology, such as in Grigori Perelman's proof of the Geometrization conjecture, which included the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a Millennium Prize Problem.[134]
+Geometric group theory often revolves around the Cayley graph, which is a geometric representation of a group. Other important topics include quasi-isometries, Gromov-hyperbolic groups, and right angled Artin groups.[133][135]
+Convex geometry investigates convex shapes in the Euclidean space and its more abstract analogues, often using techniques of real analysis and discrete mathematics.[136] It has close connections to convex analysis, optimization and functional analysis and important applications in number theory.
+Convex geometry dates back to antiquity.[136] Archimedes gave the first known precise definition of convexity. The isoperimetric problem, a recurring concept in convex geometry, was studied by the Greeks as well, including Zenodorus. Archimedes, Plato, Euclid, and later Kepler and Coxeter all studied convex polytopes and their properties. From the 19th century on, mathematicians have studied other areas of convex mathematics, including higher-dimensional polytopes, volume and surface area of convex bodies, Gaussian curvature, algorithms, tilings and lattices.
+Geometry has found applications in many fields, some of which are described below.
+Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. For instance, the theory of perspective showed that there is more to geometry than just the metric properties of figures: perspective is the origin of projective geometry.[137]
+Artists have long used concepts of proportion in design. Vitruvius developed a complicated theory of ideal proportions for the human figure.[138] These concepts have been used and adapted by artists from Michelangelo to modern comic book artists.[139]
+The golden ratio is a particular proportion that has had a controversial role in art. Often claimed to be the most aesthetically pleasing ratio of lengths, it is frequently stated to be incorporated into famous works of art, though the most reliable and unambiguous examples were made deliberately by artists aware of this legend.[140]
+Tilings, or tessellations, have been used in art throughout history. Islamic art makes frequent use of tessellations, as did the art of Escher.[141] Escher's work also made use of hyperbolic geometry.
+Cézanne advanced the theory that all images can be built up from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. This is still used in art theory today, although the exact list of shapes varies from author to author.[142][143]
+Geometry has many applications in architecture. In fact, it has been said that geometry lies at the core of architectural design.[144][145] Applications of geometry to architecture include the use of projective geometry to create forced perspective,[146] the use of conic sections in constructing domes and similar objects,[93] the use of tessellations,[93] and the use of symmetry.[93]
+The field of astronomy, especially as it relates to mapping the positions of stars and planets on the celestial sphere and describing the relationship between movements of celestial bodies, have served as an important source of geometric problems throughout history.[147]
+Riemannian geometry and pseudo-Riemannian geometry are used in general relativity.[148] String theory makes use of several variants of geometry,[149] as does quantum information theory.[150]
+Calculus was strongly influenced by geometry.[32] For instance, the introduction of coordinates by René Descartes and the concurrent developments of algebra marked a new stage for geometry, since geometric figures such as plane curves could now be represented analytically in the form of functions and equations. This played a key role in the emergence of infinitesimal calculus in the 17th century. Analytic geometry continues to be a mainstay of pre-calculus and calculus curriculum.[151][152]
+Another important area of application is number theory.[153] In ancient Greece the Pythagoreans considered the role of numbers in geometry. However, the discovery of incommensurable lengths contradicted their philosophical views.[154] Since the 19th century, geometry has been used for solving problems in number theory, for example through the geometry of numbers or, more recently, scheme theory, which is used in Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.[155]
+"Three scientists, Ibn al-Haytham, Khayyam, and al-Tusi, had made the most considerable contribution to this branch of geometry whose importance came to be completely recognized only in the 19th century. In essence, their propositions concerning the properties of quadrangles which they considered, assuming that some of the angles of these figures were acute of obtuse, embodied the first few theorems of the hyperbolic and the elliptic geometries. Their other proposals showed that various geometric statements were equivalent to the Euclidean postulate V. It is extremely important that these scholars established the mutual connection between this postulate and the sum of the angles of a triangle and a quadrangle. By their works on the theory of parallel lines Arab mathematicians directly influenced the relevant investigations of their European counterparts. The first European attempt to prove the postulate on parallel lines – made by Witelo, the Polish scientists of the 13th century, while revising Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manazir) – was undoubtedly prompted by Arabic sources. The proofs put forward in the 14th century by the Jewish scholar Levi ben Gerson, who lived in southern France, and by the above-mentioned Alfonso from Spain directly border on Ibn al-Haytham's demonstration. Above, we have demonstrated that Pseudo-Tusi's Exposition of Euclid had stimulated both J. Wallis's and G. Saccheri's studies of the theory of parallel lines."
+"Geometry" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 11 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 675–736.

en/217.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,113 @@

+Anatomy (Greek anatomē, 'dissection') is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts.[1] Anatomy is a branch of natural science which deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having its beginnings in prehistoric times.[2] Anatomy is inherently tied to developmental biology, embryology, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, and phylogeny,[3] as these are the processes by which anatomy is generated, both over immediate and long-term timescales. Anatomy and physiology, which study the structure and function of organisms and their parts respectively, make a natural pair of related disciplines, and are often studied together. Human anatomy is one of the essential basic sciences that are applied in medicine.[4]
+The discipline of anatomy is divided into macroscopic and microscopic. Macroscopic anatomy, or gross anatomy, is the examination of an animal's body parts using unaided eyesight. Gross anatomy also includes the branch of superficial anatomy. Microscopic anatomy involves the use of optical instruments in the study of the tissues of various structures, known as histology, and also in the study of cells.
+The history of anatomy is characterized by a progressive understanding of the functions of the organs and structures of the human body. Methods have also improved dramatically, advancing from the examination of animals by dissection of carcasses and cadavers (corpses) to 20th century medical imaging techniques including X-ray, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging.
+Derived from the Greek ἀνατομή anatomē "dissection" (from ἀνατέμνω anatémnō "I cut up, cut open" from ἀνά aná "up", and τέμνω témnō "I cut"),[5] anatomy is the scientific study of the structure of organisms including their systems, organs and tissues. It includes the appearance and position of the various parts, the materials from which they are composed, their locations and their relationships with other parts. Anatomy is quite distinct from physiology and biochemistry, which deal respectively with the functions of those parts and the chemical processes involved. For example, an anatomist is concerned with the shape, size, position, structure, blood supply and innervation of an organ such as the liver; while a physiologist is interested in the production of bile, the role of the liver in nutrition and the regulation of bodily functions.[6]
+The discipline of anatomy can be subdivided into a number of branches including gross or macroscopic anatomy and microscopic anatomy.[7] Gross anatomy is the study of structures large enough to be seen with the naked eye, and also includes superficial anatomy or surface anatomy, the study by sight of the external body features. Microscopic anatomy is the study of structures on a microscopic scale, along with histology (the study of tissues), and embryology (the study of an organism in its immature condition).[3]
+Anatomy can be studied using both invasive and non-invasive methods with the goal of obtaining information about the structure and organization of organs and systems.[3] Methods used include dissection, in which a body is opened and its organs studied, and endoscopy, in which a video camera-equipped instrument is inserted through a small incision in the body wall and used to explore the internal organs and other structures. Angiography using X-rays or magnetic resonance angiography are methods to visualize blood vessels.[8][9][10][11]
+The term "anatomy" is commonly taken to refer to human anatomy. However, substantially the same structures and tissues are found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom and the term also includes the anatomy of other animals. The term zootomy is also sometimes used to specifically refer to non-human animals. The structure and tissues of plants are of a dissimilar nature and they are studied in plant anatomy.[6]
+The kingdom Animalia contains multicellular organisms that are heterotrophic and motile (although some have secondarily adopted a sessile lifestyle). Most animals have bodies differentiated into separate tissues and these animals are also known as eumetazoans. They have an internal digestive chamber, with one or two openings; the gametes are produced in multicellular sex organs, and the zygotes include a blastula stage in their embryonic development. Metazoans do not include the sponges, which have undifferentiated cells.[12]
+Unlike plant cells, animal cells have neither a cell wall nor chloroplasts. Vacuoles, when present, are more in number and much smaller than those in the plant cell. The body tissues are composed of numerous types of cell, including those found in muscles, nerves and skin. Each typically has a cell membrane formed of phospholipids, cytoplasm and a nucleus.  All of the different cells of an animal are derived from the embryonic germ layers. Those simpler invertebrates which are formed from two germ layers of ectoderm and endoderm are called diploblastic and the more developed animals whose structures and organs are formed from three germ layers are called triploblastic.[13] All of a triploblastic animal's tissues and organs are derived from the three germ layers of the embryo, the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm.
+Animal tissues can be grouped into four basic types: connective, epithelial, muscle and nervous tissue.
+Connective tissues are fibrous and made up of cells scattered among inorganic material called the extracellular matrix. Connective tissue gives shape to organs and holds them in place. The main types are loose connective tissue, adipose tissue, fibrous connective tissue, cartilage and bone. The extracellular matrix contains proteins, the chief and most abundant of which is collagen. Collagen plays a major part in organizing and maintaining tissues. The matrix can be modified to form a skeleton to support or protect the body. An exoskeleton is a thickened, rigid cuticle which is stiffened by mineralization, as in crustaceans or by the cross-linking of its proteins as in insects. An endoskeleton is internal and present in all developed animals, as well as in many of those less developed.[13]
+Epithelial tissue is composed of closely packed cells, bound to each other by cell adhesion molecules, with little intercellular space. Epithelial cells can be squamous (flat), cuboidal or columnar and rest on a basal lamina, the upper layer of the basement membrane,[14] the lower layer is the reticular lamina lying next to the connective tissue in the extracellular matrix secreted by the epithelial cells.[15] There are many different types of epithelium, modified to suit a particular function. In the respiratory tract there is a type of ciliated epithelial lining; in the small intestine there are microvilli on the epithelial lining and in the large intestine there are intestinal villi. Skin consists of an outer layer of keratinized stratified squamous epithelium that covers the exterior of the vertebrate body. Keratinocytes make up to 95% of the cells in the skin.[16] The epithelial cells on the external surface of the body typically secrete an extracellular matrix in the form of a cuticle. In simple animals this may just be a coat of glycoproteins.[13] In more advanced animals, many glands are formed of epithelial cells.[17]
+Muscle cells (myocytes) form the active contractile tissue of the body. Muscle tissue functions to produce force and cause motion, either locomotion or movement within internal organs. Muscle is formed of contractile filaments and is separated into three main types; smooth muscle, skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle. Smooth muscle has no striations when examined microscopically. It contracts slowly but maintains contractibility over a wide range of stretch lengths. It is found in such organs as sea anemone tentacles and the body wall of sea cucumbers. Skeletal muscle contracts rapidly but has a limited range of extension. It is found in the movement of appendages and jaws. Obliquely striated muscle is intermediate between the other two. The filaments are staggered and this is the type of muscle found in earthworms that can extend slowly or make rapid contractions.[18] In higher animals striated muscles occur in bundles attached to bone to provide movement and are often arranged in antagonistic sets. Smooth muscle is found in the walls of the uterus, bladder, intestines, stomach, oesophagus, respiratory airways, and blood vessels. Cardiac muscle is found only in the heart, allowing it to contract and pump blood round the body.
+Nervous tissue is composed of many nerve cells known as neurons which transmit information. In some slow-moving radially symmetrical marine animals such as ctenophores and cnidarians (including sea anemones and jellyfish), the nerves form a nerve net, but in most animals they are organized longitudinally into bundles. In simple animals, receptor neurons in the body wall cause a local reaction to a stimulus. In more complex animals, specialized receptor cells such as chemoreceptors and photoreceptors are found in groups and send messages along neural networks to other parts of the organism. Neurons can be connected together in ganglia.[19] In higher animals, specialized receptors are the basis of sense organs and there is a central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and a peripheral nervous system. The latter consists of sensory nerves that transmit information from sense organs and motor nerves that influence target organs.[20][21] The peripheral nervous system is divided into the somatic nervous system which conveys sensation and controls voluntary muscle, and the autonomic nervous system which involuntarily controls smooth muscle, certain glands and internal organs, including the stomach.[22]
+All vertebrates have a similar basic body plan and at some point in their lives, mostly in the embryonic stage, share the major chordate characteristics; a stiffening rod, the notochord; a dorsal hollow tube of nervous material, the neural tube; pharyngeal arches; and a tail posterior to the anus. The spinal cord is protected by the vertebral column and is above the notochord and the gastrointestinal tract is below it.[23] Nervous tissue is derived from the ectoderm, connective tissues are derived from mesoderm, and gut is derived from the endoderm. At the posterior end is a tail which continues the spinal cord and vertebrae but not the gut. The mouth is found at the anterior end of the animal, and the anus at the base of the tail.[24] The defining characteristic of a vertebrate is the vertebral column, formed in the development of the segmented series of vertebrae. In most vertebrates the notochord becomes the nucleus pulposus of the intervertebral discs. However, a few vertebrates, such as the sturgeon and the coelacanth retain the notochord into adulthood.[25] Jawed vertebrates are typified by paired appendages, fins or legs, which may be secondarily lost. The limbs of vertebrates are considered to be homologous because the same underlying skeletal structure was inherited from their last common ancestor. This is one of the arguments put forward by Charles Darwin to support his theory of evolution.[26]
+The body of a fish is divided into a head, trunk and tail, although the divisions between the three are not always externally visible. The skeleton, which forms the support structure inside the fish, is either made of cartilage, in cartilaginous fish, or bone in bony fish. The main skeletal element is the vertebral column, composed of articulating vertebrae which are lightweight yet strong. The ribs attach to the spine and there are no limbs or limb girdles. The main external features of the fish, the fins, are composed of either bony or soft spines called rays, which with the exception of the caudal fins, have no direct connection with the spine. They are supported by the muscles which compose the main part of the trunk.[27] The heart has two chambers and pumps the blood through the respiratory surfaces of the gills and on round the body in a single circulatory loop.[28] The eyes are adapted for seeing underwater and have only local vision. There is an inner ear but no external or middle ear. Low frequency vibrations are detected by the lateral line system of sense organs that run along the length of the sides of fish, and these respond to nearby movements and to changes in water pressure.[27]
+Sharks and rays are basal fish with numerous primitive anatomical features similar to those of ancient fish, including skeletons composed of cartilage. Their bodies tend to be dorso-ventrally flattened, they usually have five pairs of gill slits and a large mouth set on the underside of the head. The dermis is covered with separate dermal placoid scales. They have a cloaca into which the urinary and genital passages open, but not a swim bladder. Cartilaginous fish produce a small number of large, yolky eggs. Some species are ovoviviparous and the young develop internally but others are oviparous and the larvae develop externally in egg cases.[29]
+The bony fish lineage shows more derived anatomical traits, often with major evolutionary changes from the features of ancient fish. They have a bony skeleton, are generally laterally flattened, have five pairs of gills protected by an operculum, and a mouth at or near the tip of the snout. The dermis is covered with overlapping scales. Bony fish have a swim bladder which helps them maintain a constant depth in the water column, but not a cloaca. They mostly spawn a large number of small eggs with little yolk which they broadcast into the water column.[29]
+Amphibians are a class of animals comprising frogs, salamanders and caecilians. They are tetrapods, but the caecilians and a few species of salamander have either no limbs or their limbs are much reduced in size. Their main bones are hollow and lightweight and are fully ossified and the vertebrae interlock with each other and have articular processes. Their ribs are usually short and may be fused to the vertebrae. Their skulls are mostly broad and short, and are often incompletely ossified. Their skin contains little keratin and lacks scales, but contains many mucous glands and in some species, poison glands. The hearts of amphibians have three chambers, two atria and one ventricle. They have a urinary bladder and nitrogenous waste products are excreted primarily as urea. Amphibians breathe by means of buccal pumping, a pump action in which air is first drawn into the buccopharyngeal region through the nostrils. These are then closed and the air is forced into the lungs by contraction of the throat.[30] They supplement this with gas exchange through the skin which needs to be kept moist.[31]
+In frogs the pelvic girdle is robust and the hind legs are much longer and stronger than the forelimbs. The feet have four or five digits and the toes are often webbed for swimming or have suction pads for climbing. Frogs have large eyes and no tail. Salamanders resemble lizards in appearance; their short legs project sideways, the belly is close to or in contact with the ground and they have a long tail. Caecilians superficially resemble earthworms and are limbless. They burrow by means of zones of muscle contractions which move along the body and they swim by undulating their body from side to side.[32]
+Reptiles are a class of animals comprising turtles, tuataras, lizards, snakes and crocodiles. They are tetrapods, but the snakes and a few species of lizard either have no limbs or their limbs are much reduced in size. Their bones are better ossified and their skeletons stronger than those of amphibians. The teeth are conical and mostly uniform in size. The surface cells of the epidermis are modified into horny scales which create a waterproof layer. Reptiles are unable to use their skin for respiration as do amphibians and have a more efficient respiratory system drawing air into their lungs by expanding their chest walls. The heart resembles that of the amphibian but there is a septum which more completely separates the oxygenated and deoxygenated bloodstreams. The reproductive system has evolved for internal fertilization, with a copulatory organ present in most species. The eggs are surrounded by amniotic membranes which prevents them from drying out and are laid on land, or develop internally in some species. The bladder is small as nitrogenous waste is excreted as uric acid.[33]
+Turtles are notable for their protective shells. They have an inflexible trunk encased in a horny carapace above and a plastron below. These are formed from bony plates embedded in the dermis which are overlain by horny ones and are partially fused with the ribs and spine. The neck is long and flexible and the head and the legs can be drawn back inside the shell. Turtles are vegetarians and the typical reptile teeth have been replaced by sharp, horny plates. In aquatic species, the front legs are modified into flippers.[34]
+Tuataras superficially resemble lizards but the lineages diverged in the Triassic period. There is one living species, Sphenodon punctatus. The skull has two openings (fenestrae) on either side and the jaw is rigidly attached to the skull. There is one row of teeth in the lower jaw and this fits between the two rows in the upper jaw when the animal chews. The teeth are merely projections of bony material from the jaw and eventually wear down. The brain and heart are more primitive than those of other reptiles, and the lungs have a single chamber and lack bronchi. The tuatara has a well-developed parietal eye on its forehead.[34]
+Lizards have skulls with only one fenestra on each side, the lower bar of bone below the second fenestra having been lost. This results in the jaws being less rigidly attached which allows the mouth to open wider. Lizards are mostly quadrupeds, with the trunk held off the ground by short, sideways-facing legs, but a few species have no limbs and resemble snakes. Lizards have moveable eyelids, eardrums are present and some species have a central parietal eye.[34]
+Snakes are closely related to lizards, having branched off from a common ancestral lineage during the Cretaceous period, and they share many of the same features. The skeleton consists of a skull, a hyoid bone, spine and ribs though a few species retain a vestige of the pelvis and rear limbs in the form of pelvic spurs. The bar under the second fenestra has also been lost and the jaws have extreme flexibility allowing the snake to swallow its prey whole. Snakes lack moveable eyelids, the eyes being covered by transparent "spectacle" scales. They do not have eardrums but can detect ground vibrations through the bones of their skull. Their forked tongues are used as organs of taste and smell and some species have sensory pits on their heads enabling them to locate warm-blooded prey.[35]
+Crocodilians are large, low-slung aquatic reptiles with long snouts and large numbers of teeth. The head and trunk are dorso-ventrally flattened and the tail is laterally compressed. It undulates from side to side to force the animal through the water when swimming. The tough keratinized scales provide body armour and some are fused to the skull. The nostrils, eyes and ears are elevated above the top of the flat head enabling them to remain above the surface of the water when the animal is floating. Valves seal the nostrils and ears when it is submerged. Unlike other reptiles, crocodilians have hearts with four chambers allowing complete separation of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood.[36]
+Birds are tetrapods but though their hind limbs are used for walking or hopping, their front limbs are wings covered with feathers and adapted for flight. Birds are endothermic, have a high metabolic rate, a light skeletal system and powerful muscles. The long bones are thin, hollow and very light. Air sac extensions from the lungs occupy the centre of some bones. The sternum is wide and usually has a keel and the caudal vertebrae are fused. There are no teeth and the narrow jaws are adapted into a horn-covered beak. The eyes are relatively large, particularly in nocturnal species such as owls. They face forwards in predators and sideways in ducks.[37]
+The feathers are outgrowths of the epidermis and are found in localized bands from where they fan out over the skin. Large flight feathers are found on the wings and tail, contour feathers cover the bird's surface and fine down occurs on young birds and under the contour feathers of water birds. The only cutaneous gland is the single uropygial gland near the base of the tail. This produces an oily secretion that waterproofs the feathers when the bird preens. There are scales on the legs, feet and claws on the tips of the toes.[37]
+Mammals are a diverse class of animals, mostly terrestrial but some are aquatic and others have evolved flapping or gliding flight. They mostly have four limbs but some aquatic mammals have no limbs or limbs modified into fins and the forelimbs of bats are modified into wings. The legs of most mammals are situated below the trunk, which is held well clear of the ground. The bones of mammals are well ossified and their teeth, which are usually differentiated, are coated in a layer of prismatic enamel. The teeth are shed once (milk teeth) during the animal's lifetime or not at all, as is the case in cetaceans. Mammals have three bones in the middle ear and a cochlea in the inner ear. They are clothed in hair and their skin contains glands which secrete sweat. Some of these glands are specialized as mammary glands, producing milk to feed the young. Mammals breathe with lungs and have a muscular diaphragm separating the thorax from the abdomen which helps them draw air into the lungs. The mammalian heart has four chambers and oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are kept entirely separate. Nitrogenous waste is excreted primarily as urea.[38]
+Mammals are amniotes, and most are viviparous, giving birth to live young. The exception to this are the egg-laying monotremes, the platypus and the echidnas of Australia. Most other mammals have a placenta through which the developing foetus obtains nourishment, but in marsupials, the foetal stage is very short and the immature young is born and finds its way to its mother's pouch where it latches on to a nipple and completes its development.[38]
+Humans have the overall body plan of a mammal. Humans have a head, neck, trunk (which includes the thorax and abdomen), two arms and hands, and two legs and feet.
+Generally, students of certain biological sciences, paramedics, prosthetists and orthotists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nurses, podiatrists, and medical students learn gross anatomy and microscopic anatomy from anatomical models, skeletons, textbooks, diagrams, photographs, lectures and tutorials and in addition, medical students generally also learn gross anatomy through practical experience of dissection and inspection of cadavers. The study of microscopic anatomy (or histology) can be aided by practical experience examining histological preparations (or slides) under a microscope.
+[40]
+Human anatomy, physiology and biochemistry are complementary basic medical sciences, which are generally taught to medical students in their first year at medical school. Human anatomy can be taught regionally or systemically; that is, respectively, studying anatomy by bodily regions such as the head and chest, or studying by specific systems, such as the nervous or respiratory systems.[3] The major anatomy textbook, Gray's Anatomy, has been reorganized from a systems format to a regional format, in line with modern teaching methods.[41][42] A thorough working knowledge of anatomy is required by physicians, especially surgeons and doctors working in some diagnostic specialties, such as histopathology and radiology.
+[43]
+Academic anatomists are usually employed by universities, medical schools or teaching hospitals. They are often involved in teaching anatomy, and research into certain systems, organs, tissues or cells.[43]
+Invertebrates constitute a vast array of living organisms ranging from the simplest unicellular eukaryotes such as Paramecium to such complex multicellular animals as the octopus, lobster and dragonfly. They constitute about 95% of the animal species. By definition, none of these creatures has a backbone. The cells of single-cell protozoans have the same basic structure as those of multicellular animals but some parts are specialized into the equivalent of tissues and organs. Locomotion is often provided by cilia or flagella or may proceed via the advance of pseudopodia, food may be gathered by phagocytosis, energy needs may be supplied by photosynthesis and the cell may be supported by an endoskeleton or an exoskeleton. Some protozoans can form multicellular colonies.[44]
+Metazoans are multicellular organism, different groups of cells of which have separate functions. The most basic types of metazoan tissues are epithelium and connective tissue, both of which are present in nearly all invertebrates. The outer surface of the epidermis is normally formed of epithelial cells and secretes an extracellular matrix which provides support to the organism. An endoskeleton derived from the mesoderm is present in echinoderms, sponges and some cephalopods. Exoskeletons are derived from the epidermis and is composed of chitin in arthropods (insects, spiders, ticks, shrimps, crabs, lobsters). Calcium carbonate constitutes the shells of molluscs, brachiopods and some tube-building polychaete worms and silica forms the exoskeleton of the microscopic diatoms and radiolaria.[45] Other invertebrates may have no rigid structures but the epidermis may secrete a variety of surface coatings such as the pinacoderm of sponges, the gelatinous cuticle of cnidarians (polyps, sea anemones, jellyfish) and the collagenous cuticle of annelids. The outer epithelial layer may include cells of several types including sensory cells, gland cells and stinging cells. There may also be protrusions such as microvilli, cilia, bristles, spines and tubercles.[46]
+Marcello Malpighi, the father of microscopical anatomy, discovered that plants had tubules similar to those he saw in insects like the silk worm. He observed that when a ring-like portion of bark was removed on a trunk a swelling occurred in the tissues above the ring, and he unmistakably interpreted this as growth stimulated by food coming down from the leaves, and being captured above the ring.[47]
+Arthropods comprise the largest phylum in the animal kingdom with over a million known invertebrate species.[48]
+Insects possess segmented bodies supported by a hard-jointed outer covering, the exoskeleton, made mostly of chitin. The segments of the body are organized into three distinct parts, a head, a thorax and an abdomen.[49] The head typically bears a pair of sensory antennae, a pair of compound eyes, one to three simple eyes (ocelli) and three sets of modified appendages that form the mouthparts. The thorax has three pairs of segmented legs, one pair each for the three segments that compose the thorax and one or two pairs of wings. The abdomen is composed of eleven segments, some of which may be fused and houses the digestive, respiratory, excretory and reproductive systems.[50] There is considerable variation between species and many adaptations to the body parts, especially wings, legs, antennae and mouthparts.[51]
+Spiders a class of arachnids have four pairs of legs; a body of two segments—a cephalothorax and an abdomen. Spiders have no wings and no antennae. They have mouthparts called chelicerae which are often connected to venom glands as most spiders are venomous. They have a second pair of appendages called pedipalps attached to the cephalothorax. These have similar segmentation to the legs and function as taste and smell organs. At the end of each male pedipalp is a spoon-shaped cymbium that acts to support the copulatory organ.
+In 1600 BCE, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Ancient Egyptian medical text, described the heart, its vessels, liver, spleen, kidneys, hypothalamus, uterus and bladder, and showed the blood vessels diverging from the heart. The Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) features a "treatise on the heart", with vessels carrying all the body's fluids to or from every member of the body.[53]
+Ancient Greek anatomy and physiology underwent great changes and advances throughout the early medieval world.  Over time, this medical practice expanded by a continually developing understanding of the functions of organs and structures in the body. Phenomenal anatomical observations of the human body were made, which have contributed towards the understanding of the brain, eye, liver, reproductive organs and the nervous system.
+The Hellenistic Egyptian city of Alexandria was the stepping-stone for Greek anatomy and physiology. Alexandria not only housed the biggest library for medical records and books of the liberal arts in the world during the time of the Greeks, but was also home to many medical practitioners and philosophers. Great patronage of the arts and sciences from the Ptolemy rulers helped raise Alexandria up, further rivalling the cultural and scientific achievements of other Greek states.[54]
+Some of the most striking advances in early anatomy and physiology took place in Hellenistic Alexandria.[54] Two of the most famous anatomists and physiologists of the third century were Herophilus and Erasistratus. These two physicians helped pioneer human dissection for medical research. They also conducted vivisections on the cadavers of condemned criminals, which was considered taboo until the Renaissance—Herophilus was recognized as the first person to perform systematic dissections.[55] Herophilus became known for his anatomical works making impressing contributions to many branches of anatomy and many other aspects of medicine.[56] Some of the works included classifying the system of the pulse, the discovery that human arteries had thicker walls than veins, and that the atria were parts of the heart. Herophilus's knowledge of the human body has provided vital input towards understanding the brain, eye, liver, reproductive organs and nervous system, and characterizing the course of disease.[57] Erasistratus accurately described the structure of the brain, including the cavities and membranes, and made a distinction between its cerebrum and cerebellum[58] During his study in Alexandria, Erasistratus was particularly concerned with studies of the circulatory and nervous systems. He was able to distinguish the sensory and the motor nerves in the human body and believed that air entered the lungs and heart, which was then carried throughout the body. His distinction between the arteries and veins—the arteries carrying the air through the body, while the veins carried the blood from the heart was a great anatomical discovery. Erasistratus was also responsible for naming and describing the function of the epiglottis and the valves of the heart, including the tricuspid.[59] During the third century, Greek physicians were able to differentiate nerves from blood vessels and tendons[60] and to realize that the nerves convey neural impulses.[54] It was Herophilus who made the point that damage to motor nerves induced paralysis.[61] Herophilus named the meninges and ventricles in the brain, appreciated the division between cerebellum and cerebrum and recognized that the brain was the "seat of intellect" and not a "cooling chamber" as propounded by Aristotle[62] Herophilus is also credited with describing the optic, oculomotor, motor division of the trigeminal, facial, vestibulocochlear and hypoglossal nerves.[63]
+Great feats were made during the third century in both the digestive and reproductive systems. Herophilus was able to discover and describe not only the salivary glands, but the small intestine and liver.[63] He showed that the uterus is a hollow organ and described the ovaries and uterine tubes. He recognized that spermatozoa were produced by the testes and was the first to identify the prostate gland.[63]
+The anatomy of the muscles and skeleton is described in the Hippocratic Corpus, an Ancient Greek medical work written by unknown authors.[64] Aristotle described vertebrate anatomy based on animal dissection. Praxagoras identified the difference between arteries and veins. Also in the 4th century BCE, Herophilos and Erasistratus produced more accurate anatomical descriptions based on vivisection of criminals in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic dynasty.[65][66]
+In the 2nd century, Galen of Pergamum, an anatomist, clinician, writer and philosopher,[67] wrote the final and highly influential anatomy treatise of ancient times.[68] He compiled existing knowledge and studied anatomy through dissection of animals.[67] He was one of the first experimental physiologists through his vivisection experiments on animals.[69] Galen's drawings, based mostly on dog anatomy, became effectively the only anatomical textbook for the next thousand years.[70] His work was known to Renaissance doctors only through Islamic Golden Age medicine until it was translated from the Greek some time in the 15th century.[70]
+Anatomy developed little from classical times until the sixteenth century; as the historian Marie Boas writes, "Progress in anatomy before the sixteenth century is as mysteriously slow as its development after 1500 is startlingly rapid".[70]:120–121 Between 1275 and 1326, the anatomists Mondino de Luzzi, Alessandro Achillini and Antonio Benivieni at Bologna carried out the first systematic human dissections since ancient times.[71][72][73] Mondino's Anatomy of 1316 was the first textbook in the medieval rediscovery of human anatomy. It describes the body in the order followed in Mondino's dissections, starting with the abdomen, then the thorax, then the head and limbs. It was the standard anatomy textbook for the next century.[70]
+Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was trained in anatomy by Andrea del Verrocchio.[70] He made use of his anatomical knowledge in his artwork, making many sketches of skeletal structures, muscles and organs of humans and other vertebrates that he dissected.[70][74]
+Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) (Latinized from Andries van Wezel), professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, is considered the founder of modern human anatomy.[75] Originally from Brabant, Vesalius published the influential book De humani corporis fabrica ("the structure of the human body"), a large format book in seven volumes, in 1543.[76] The accurate and intricately detailed illustrations, often in allegorical poses against Italianate landscapes, are thought to have been made by the artist Jan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian.[77]
+In England, anatomy was the subject of the first public lectures given in any science; these were given by the Company of Barbers and Surgeons in the 16th century, joined in 1583 by the Lumleian lectures in surgery at the Royal College of Physicians.[78]
+In the United States, medical schools began to be set up towards the end of the 18th century. Classes in anatomy needed a continual stream of cadavers for dissection and these were difficult to obtain. Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York were all renowned for body snatching activity as criminals raided graveyards at night, removing newly buried corpses from their coffins.[79] A similar problem existed in Britain where demand for bodies became so great that grave-raiding and even anatomy murder were practised to obtain cadavers.[80] Some graveyards were in consequence protected with watchtowers. The practice was halted in Britain by the Anatomy Act of 1832,[81][82] while in the United States, similar legislation was enacted after the physician William S. Forbes of Jefferson Medical College was found guilty in 1882 of "complicity with resurrectionists in the despoliation of graves in Lebanon Cemetery".[83]
+The teaching of anatomy in Britain was transformed by Sir John Struthers, Regius Professor of Anatomy at the University of Aberdeen from 1863 to 1889. He was responsible for setting up the system of three years of "pre-clinical" academic teaching in the sciences underlying medicine, including especially anatomy. This system lasted until the reform of medical training in 1993 and 2003. As well as teaching, he collected many vertebrate skeletons for his museum of comparative anatomy, published over 70 research papers, and became famous for his public dissection of the Tay Whale.[84][85] From 1822 the Royal College of Surgeons regulated the teaching of anatomy in medical schools.[86] Medical museums provided examples in comparative anatomy, and were often used in teaching.[87] Ignaz Semmelweis investigated puerperal fever and he discovered how it was caused. He noticed that the frequently fatal fever occurred more often in mothers examined by medical students than by midwives. The students went from the dissecting room to the hospital ward and examined women in childbirth. Semmelweis showed that when the trainees washed their hands in chlorinated lime before each clinical examination, the incidence of puerperal fever among the mothers could be reduced dramatically.[88]
+Before the modern medical era, the main means for studying the internal structures of the body were dissection of the dead and inspection, palpation and auscultation of the living. It was the advent of microscopy that opened up an understanding of the building blocks that constituted living tissues. Technical advances in the development of achromatic lenses increased the resolving power of the microscope and around 1839, Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann identified that cells were the fundamental unit of organization of all living things. Study of small structures involved passing light through them and the microtome was invented to provide sufficiently thin slices of tissue to examine. Staining techniques using artificial dyes were established to help distinguish between different types of tissue. Advances in the fields of histology and cytology began in the late 19th century[89] along with advances in surgical techniques allowing for the painless and safe removal of biopsy specimens. The invention of the electron microscope brought a great advance in resolution power and allowed research into the ultrastructure of cells and the organelles and other structures within them. About the same time, in the 1950s, the use of X-ray diffraction for studying the crystal structures of proteins, nucleic acids and other biological molecules gave rise to a new field of molecular anatomy.[89]
+Equally important advances have occurred in  non-invasive techniques for examining the interior structures of the body. X-rays can be passed through the body and used in medical radiography and fluoroscopy to differentiate interior structures that have varying degrees of opaqueness. Magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and ultrasound imaging have all enabled examination of internal structures in unprecedented detail to a degree far beyond the imagination of earlier generations.[90]

en/2170.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@

+Geometry (from the Ancient Greek: γεωμετρία; geo- "earth", -metron "measurement") is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space.[1] A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.
+Geometry arose independently in a number of early cultures as a practical way for dealing with lengths, areas, and volumes.[1] Geometry began to see elements of formal mathematical science emerging in Greek mathematics as early as the 6th century BC.[2] By the 3rd century BC, geometry was put into an axiomatic form by Euclid, whose treatment, The Elements, set a standard for many centuries to follow.[3] Geometry arose independently in India, with texts providing rules for geometric constructions appearing as early as the 3rd century BC.[4] Islamic scientists preserved Greek ideas and expanded on them during the Middle Ages.[5] By the early 17th century, geometry had been put on a solid analytic footing by mathematicians such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. Since then, and into modern times, geometry has expanded into non-Euclidean geometry and manifolds, describing spaces that lie beyond the normal range of human experience.[6]
+While geometry has evolved significantly throughout the years, there are some general concepts that are fundamental to geometry. These include the concepts of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as well as the more advanced notions of topology and manifold.[7]
+Geometry has applications to many fields, including art, architecture, physics, as well as to other branches of mathematics.[8]
+The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC.[9][10] Early geometry was a collection of empirically discovered principles concerning lengths, angles, areas, and volumes, which were developed to meet some practical need in surveying, construction, astronomy, and various crafts. The earliest known texts on geometry are the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus (2000–1800 BC) and Moscow Papyrus (c. 1890 BC), the Babylonian clay tablets such as Plimpton 322 (1900 BC). For example, the Moscow Papyrus gives a formula for calculating the volume of a truncated pyramid, or frustum.[11] Later clay tablets (350–50 BC) demonstrate that Babylonian astronomers implemented trapezoid procedures for computing Jupiter's position and motion within time-velocity space. These geometric procedures anticipated the Oxford Calculators, including the mean speed theorem, by 14 centuries.[12] South of Egypt the ancient Nubians established a system of geometry including early versions of sun clocks.[13][14]
+In the 7th century BC, the Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore.  He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' Theorem.[2] Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, which is credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem,[15]  though the statement of the theorem has a long history.[16][17] Eudoxus (408–c. 355 BC) developed the method of exhaustion, which allowed the calculation of areas and volumes of curvilinear figures,[18] as well as a theory of ratios that avoided the problem of incommensurable magnitudes, which enabled subsequent geometers to make significant advances. Around 300 BC, geometry was revolutionized by Euclid, whose Elements, widely considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time,[19] introduced mathematical rigor through the axiomatic method and is the earliest example of the format still used in mathematics today, that of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof. Although most of the contents of the Elements were already known, Euclid arranged them into a single, coherent logical framework.[20] The Elements was known to all educated people in the West until the middle of the 20th century and its contents are still taught in geometry classes today.[21] Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) of Syracuse used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave remarkably accurate approximations of Pi.[22] He also studied the spiral bearing his name and obtained formulas for the volumes of surfaces of revolution.
+Indian mathematicians also made many important contributions in geometry. The Satapatha Brahmana (3rd century BC) contains rules for ritual geometric constructions that are similar to the Sulba Sutras.[4] According to (Hayashi 2005, p. 363), the Śulba Sūtras contain "the earliest extant verbal expression of the Pythagorean Theorem in the world, although it had already been known to the Old Babylonians. They contain lists of Pythagorean triples,[23] which are particular cases of Diophantine equations.[24]
+In the Bakhshali manuscript, there is a handful of geometric problems (including problems about volumes of irregular solids). The Bakhshali manuscript also "employs a decimal place value system with a dot for zero."[25] Aryabhata's Aryabhatiya (499) includes the computation of areas and volumes.
+Brahmagupta wrote his astronomical work Brāhma Sphuṭa Siddhānta in 628. Chapter 12, containing 66 Sanskrit verses, was divided into two sections: "basic operations" (including cube roots, fractions, ratio and proportion, and barter) and "practical mathematics" (including mixture, mathematical series, plane figures, stacking bricks, sawing of timber, and piling of grain).[26] In the latter section, he stated his famous theorem on the diagonals of a cyclic quadrilateral. Chapter 12 also included a formula for the area of a cyclic quadrilateral (a generalization of Heron's formula), as well as a complete description of rational triangles (i.e. triangles with rational sides and rational areas).[26]
+In the Middle Ages, mathematics in medieval Islam contributed to the development of geometry, especially algebraic geometry.[27][28] Al-Mahani (b. 853) conceived the idea of reducing geometrical problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra.[29] Thābit ibn Qurra (known as Thebit in Latin) (836–901) dealt with arithmetic operations applied to ratios of geometrical quantities, and contributed to the development of analytic geometry.[5] Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) found geometric solutions to cubic equations.[30]  The theorems of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Omar Khayyam and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi on quadrilaterals, including the Lambert quadrilateral and Saccheri quadrilateral, were early results in hyperbolic geometry, and along with their alternative postulates, such as Playfair's axiom, these works had a considerable influence on the development of non-Euclidean geometry among later European geometers, including Witelo (c. 1230–c. 1314), Gersonides (1288–1344), Alfonso, John Wallis, and Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri.[31]
+In the early 17th century, there were two important developments in geometry. The first was the creation of analytic geometry, or geometry with coordinates and equations, by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665).[32] This was a necessary precursor to the development of calculus and a precise quantitative science of physics.[33] The second geometric development of this period was the systematic study of projective geometry by Girard Desargues (1591–1661).[34] Projective geometry studies properties of shapes which are unchanged under projections and sections, especially as they relate to artistic perspective.[35]
+Two developments in geometry in the 19th century changed the way it had been studied previously.[36] These were the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, János Bolyai and Carl Friedrich Gauss and of the formulation of symmetry as the central consideration in the Erlangen Programme of Felix Klein (which generalized the Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries). Two of the master geometers of the time were Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), working primarily with tools from mathematical analysis, and introducing the Riemann surface, and Henri Poincaré, the founder of algebraic topology and the geometric theory of dynamical systems. As a consequence of these major changes in the conception of geometry, the concept of "space" became something rich and varied, and the natural background for theories as different as complex analysis and classical mechanics.[37]
+The following are some of the most important concepts in geometry.[7][38][39]
+Euclid took an abstract approach to geometry in his Elements,[40] one of the most influential books ever written.[41] Euclid introduced certain axioms, or postulates, expressing primary or self-evident properties of points, lines, and planes.[42] He proceeded to rigorously deduce other properties by mathematical reasoning. The characteristic feature of Euclid's approach to geometry was its rigor, and it has come to be known as axiomatic or synthetic geometry.[43] At the start of the 19th century, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856), János Bolyai (1802–1860), Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and others[44] led to a revival of interest in this discipline, and in the 20th century, David Hilbert (1862–1943) employed axiomatic reasoning in an attempt to provide a modern foundation of geometry.[45]
+Points are considered fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry. They have been defined in a variety of ways, including Euclid's definition as 'that which has no part'[46] and through the use of algebra or nested sets.[47] In many areas of geometry, such as analytic geometry, differential geometry, and topology, all objects are considered to be built up from points. However, there has been some study of geometry without reference to points.[48]
+Euclid described a line as "breadthless length" which "lies equally with respect to the points on itself".[46] In modern mathematics, given the multitude of geometries, the concept of a line is closely tied to the way the geometry is described. For instance, in analytic geometry, a line in the plane is often defined as the set of points whose coordinates satisfy a given linear equation,[49] but in a more abstract setting, such as incidence geometry, a line may be an independent object, distinct from the set of points which lie on it.[50] In differential geometry, a geodesic is a generalization of the notion of a line to curved spaces.[51]
+A plane is a flat, two-dimensional surface that extends infinitely far.[46] Planes are used in every area of geometry. For instance, planes can be studied as a topological surface without reference to distances or angles;[52] it can be studied as an affine space, where collinearity and ratios can be studied but not distances;[53] it can be studied as the complex plane using techniques of complex analysis;[54] and so on.
+Euclid defines a plane angle as the inclination to each other, in a plane, of two lines which meet each other, and do not lie straight with respect to each other.[46] In modern terms, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle.[55]
+In Euclidean geometry, angles are used to study polygons and triangles, as well as forming an object of study in their own right.[46] The study of the angles of a triangle or of angles in a unit circle forms the basis of trigonometry.[56]
+In differential geometry and calculus, the angles between plane curves or space curves or surfaces can be calculated using the derivative.[57][58]
+A curve is a 1-dimensional object that may be straight (like a line) or not; curves in 2-dimensional space are called plane curves and those in 3-dimensional space are called space curves.[59]
+In topology, a curve is defined by a function from an interval of the real numbers to another space.[52] In differential geometry, the same definition is used, but the defining function is required to be differentiable [60] Algebraic geometry studies algebraic curves, which are defined as algebraic varieties of dimension one.[61]
+A surface is a two-dimensional object, such as a sphere or paraboloid.[62] In differential geometry[60] and topology,[52] surfaces are described by two-dimensional 'patches' (or neighborhoods) that are assembled by diffeomorphisms or homeomorphisms, respectively. In algebraic geometry, surfaces are described by polynomial equations.[61]
+A manifold is a generalization of the concepts of curve and surface. In topology, a manifold is a topological space where every point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to Euclidean space.[52] In differential geometry, a differentiable manifold is a space where each neighborhood is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space.[60]
+Manifolds are used extensively in physics, including in general relativity and string theory.[63]
+Length, area, and volume describe the size or extent of an object in one dimension, two dimension, and three dimensions respectively.[64]
+In Euclidean geometry and analytic geometry, the length of a line segment can often be calculated by the Pythagorean theorem.[65]
+Area and volume can be defined as fundamental quantities separate from length, or they can be described and calculated in terms of lengths in a plane or 3-dimensional space.[64] Mathematicians have found many explicit formulas for area and formulas for volume of various geometric objects. In calculus, area and volume can be defined in terms of integrals, such as the Riemann integral[66] or the Lebesgue integral.[67]
+The concept of length or distance can be generalized, leading to the idea of metrics.[68] For instance, the Euclidean metric measures the distance between points in the Euclidean plane, while the hyperbolic metric measures the distance in the hyperbolic plane. Other important examples of metrics include the Lorentz metric of special relativity and the semi-Riemannian metrics of general relativity.[69]
+In a different direction, the concepts of length, area and volume are extended by measure theory, which studies methods of assigning a size or measure to sets, where the measures follow rules similar to those of classical area and volume.[70]
+Congruence and similarity are concepts that describe when two shapes have similar characteristics.[71] In Euclidean geometry, similarity is used to describe objects that have the same shape, while congruence is used to describe objects that are the same in both size and shape.[72] Hilbert, in his work on creating a more rigorous foundation for geometry, treated congruence as an undefined term whose properties are defined by axioms.
+Congruence and similarity are generalized in transformation geometry, which studies the properties of geometric objects that are preserved by different kinds of transformations.[73]
+Classical geometers paid special attention to constructing geometric objects that had been described in some other way. Classically, the only instruments allowed in geometric constructions are the compass and straightedge. Also, every construction had to be complete in a finite number of steps. However, some problems turned out to be difficult or impossible to solve by these means alone, and ingenious constructions using parabolas and other curves, as well as mechanical devices, were found.
+Where the traditional geometry allowed dimensions 1 (a line), 2 (a plane) and 3 (our ambient world conceived of as three-dimensional space), mathematicians and physicists have used higher dimensions for nearly two centuries.[74] One example of a mathematical use for higher dimensions is the configuration space of a physical system, which has a dimension equal to the system's degrees of freedom. For instance, the configuration of a screw can be described by five coordinates.[75]
+In general topology, the concept of dimension has been extended from natural numbers, to infinite dimension (Hilbert spaces, for example) and  positive real numbers (in fractal geometry).[76] In algebraic geometry, the dimension of an algebraic variety has received a number of apparently different definitions, which are all equivalent in the most common cases.[77]
+The theme of symmetry in geometry is nearly as old as the science of geometry itself.[78] Symmetric shapes such as the circle, regular polygons and platonic solids held deep significance for many ancient philosophers[79] and were investigated in detail before the time of Euclid.[42] Symmetric patterns occur in nature and were artistically rendered in a multitude of forms, including the graphics of da Vinci, M.C. Escher, and others.[80] In the second half of the 19th century, the relationship between symmetry and geometry came under intense scrutiny. Felix Klein's Erlangen program proclaimed that, in a very precise sense, symmetry, expressed via the notion of a transformation group, determines what geometry is.[81] Symmetry in classical Euclidean geometry is represented by congruences and rigid motions, whereas in projective geometry an analogous role is played by collineations, geometric transformations that take straight lines into straight lines.[82] However it was in the new geometries of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, Riemann, Clifford and Klein, and Sophus Lie that Klein's idea to 'define a geometry via its symmetry group' found its inspiration.[83] Both discrete and continuous symmetries play prominent roles in geometry, the former in topology and geometric group theory,[84][85] the latter in Lie theory and Riemannian geometry.[86][87]
+A different type of symmetry is the principle of duality  in projective geometry, among other fields. This meta-phenomenon can roughly be described as follows: in any theorem, exchange point with plane, join with meet, lies in with contains, and the result is an equally true theorem.[88] A similar and closely related form of duality exists between a vector space and its dual space.[89]
+Euclidean geometry is geometry in its classical sense.[90] As it models the space of the physical world, it is used in many scientific areas, such as mechanics, astronomy, crystallography,[91] and many technical fields, such as engineering,[92] architecture,[93] geodesy,[94] aerodynamics,[95] and navigation.[96] The mandatory educational curriculum of the majority of nations includes the study of Euclidean concepts such as points, lines, planes, angles, triangles, congruence, similarity, solid figures, circles, and analytic geometry.[38]
+Differential geometry uses techniques of calculus and linear algebra to study problems in geometry.[97] It has applications in physics,[98] econometrics,[99] and bioinformatics,[100] among others.
+In particular, differential geometry is of importance to mathematical physics due to Albert Einstein's general relativity postulation that the universe is curved.[101] Differential geometry can either be intrinsic (meaning that the spaces it considers are smooth manifolds whose geometric structure is governed by a Riemannian metric, which determines how distances are measured near each point) or extrinsic (where the object under study is a part of some ambient flat Euclidean space).[102]
+Euclidean geometry was not the only historical form of geometry studied. Spherical geometry has long been used by astronomers, astrologers, and navigators.[103]
+Immanuel Kant argued that there is only one, absolute, geometry, which is known to be true a priori by an inner faculty of mind: Euclidean geometry was synthetic a priori.[104]  This view was at first somewhat challenged by thinkers such as Saccheri, then finally overturned by the revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the works of Bolyai, Lobachevsky, and Gauss (who never published his theory).[105] They demonstrated that ordinary Euclidean space is only one possibility for development of geometry. A broad vision of the subject of geometry was then expressed  by Riemann in his 1867 inauguration lecture Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (On the hypotheses on which geometry is based),[106] published only after his death. Riemann's new idea of space proved crucial in Albert Einstein's general relativity theory. Riemannian geometry, which considers very general spaces in which the notion of length is defined, is a mainstay of modern geometry.[83]
+Topology is the field concerned with the properties of continuous mappings,[107] and can be considered a generalization of Euclidean geometry.[108] In practice, topology often means dealing with large-scale properties of spaces, such as connectedness and compactness.[52]
+The field of topology, which saw massive development in the 20th century, is in a technical sense a type of transformation geometry, in which transformations are homeomorphisms.[109] This has often been expressed in the form of the saying 'topology is rubber-sheet geometry'. Subfields of topology include geometric topology, differential topology, algebraic topology and general topology.[110]
+The field of algebraic geometry developed from the Cartesian geometry of co-ordinates.[111] It underwent periodic periods of growth, accompanied by the creation and study of projective geometry, birational geometry, algebraic varieties, and commutative algebra, among other topics.[112] From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s it had undergone major foundational development, largely due to work of Jean-Pierre Serre and Alexander Grothendieck.[112] This led to the introduction of schemes and greater emphasis on topological methods, including various cohomology theories. One of seven Millennium Prize problems, the Hodge conjecture, is a question in algebraic geometry.[113] Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem uses advanced methods of algebraic geometry for solving a long-standing problem of number theory.
+In general, algebraic geometry studies geometry through the use of concepts in commutative algebra such as multivariate polynomials.[114] It has applications in many areas, including cryptography[115] and string theory.[116]
+Complex geometry studies the nature of geometric structures modelled on, or arising out of, the complex plane.[117][118][119] Complex geometry lies at the intersection of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and analysis of several complex variables, and has found applications to string theory and mirror symmetry.[120]
+Complex geometry first appeared as a distinct area of study in the work of Bernhard Riemann in his study of Riemann surfaces.[121][122][123] Work in the spirit of Riemann was carried out by the Italian school of algebraic geometry in the early 1900s. Contemporary treatment of complex geometry began with the work of Jean-Pierre Serre, who introduced the concept of sheaves to the subject, and illuminated the relations between complex geometry and algebraic geometry.[124][125]
+The primary objects of study in complex geometry are complex manifolds, complex algebraic varieties, and complex analytic varieties, and holomorphic vector bundles and coherent sheaves over these spaces. Special examples of spaces studied in complex geometry include Riemann surfaces, and Calabi-Yau manifolds, and these spaces find uses in string theory. In particular, worldsheets of strings are modelled by Riemann surfaces, and superstring theory predicts that the extra 6 dimensions of 10 dimensional spacetime may be modelled by Calabi-Yau manifolds.
+Discrete geometry is a subject that has close connections with convex geometry.[126][127][128] It is concerned mainly with questions of relative position of simple geometric objects, such as points, lines and circles. Examples include the study of sphere packings, triangulations, the Kneser-Poulsen conjecture, etc.[129][130] It shares many methods and principles with combinatorics.
+Computational geometry deals with algorithms and their implementations for manipulating geometrical objects. Important problems historically have included the travelling salesman problem, minimum spanning trees, hidden-line removal, and linear programming.[131]
+Although being a young area of geometry, it has many applications in computer vision, image processing, computer-aided design, medical imaging, etc.[132]
+Geometric group theory uses large-scale geometric techniques to study finitely generated groups.[133] It is closely connected to low-dimensional topology, such as in Grigori Perelman's proof of the Geometrization conjecture, which included the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a Millennium Prize Problem.[134]
+Geometric group theory often revolves around the Cayley graph, which is a geometric representation of a group. Other important topics include quasi-isometries, Gromov-hyperbolic groups, and right angled Artin groups.[133][135]
+Convex geometry investigates convex shapes in the Euclidean space and its more abstract analogues, often using techniques of real analysis and discrete mathematics.[136] It has close connections to convex analysis, optimization and functional analysis and important applications in number theory.
+Convex geometry dates back to antiquity.[136] Archimedes gave the first known precise definition of convexity. The isoperimetric problem, a recurring concept in convex geometry, was studied by the Greeks as well, including Zenodorus. Archimedes, Plato, Euclid, and later Kepler and Coxeter all studied convex polytopes and their properties. From the 19th century on, mathematicians have studied other areas of convex mathematics, including higher-dimensional polytopes, volume and surface area of convex bodies, Gaussian curvature, algorithms, tilings and lattices.
+Geometry has found applications in many fields, some of which are described below.
+Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. For instance, the theory of perspective showed that there is more to geometry than just the metric properties of figures: perspective is the origin of projective geometry.[137]
+Artists have long used concepts of proportion in design. Vitruvius developed a complicated theory of ideal proportions for the human figure.[138] These concepts have been used and adapted by artists from Michelangelo to modern comic book artists.[139]
+The golden ratio is a particular proportion that has had a controversial role in art. Often claimed to be the most aesthetically pleasing ratio of lengths, it is frequently stated to be incorporated into famous works of art, though the most reliable and unambiguous examples were made deliberately by artists aware of this legend.[140]
+Tilings, or tessellations, have been used in art throughout history. Islamic art makes frequent use of tessellations, as did the art of Escher.[141] Escher's work also made use of hyperbolic geometry.
+Cézanne advanced the theory that all images can be built up from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. This is still used in art theory today, although the exact list of shapes varies from author to author.[142][143]
+Geometry has many applications in architecture. In fact, it has been said that geometry lies at the core of architectural design.[144][145] Applications of geometry to architecture include the use of projective geometry to create forced perspective,[146] the use of conic sections in constructing domes and similar objects,[93] the use of tessellations,[93] and the use of symmetry.[93]
+The field of astronomy, especially as it relates to mapping the positions of stars and planets on the celestial sphere and describing the relationship between movements of celestial bodies, have served as an important source of geometric problems throughout history.[147]
+Riemannian geometry and pseudo-Riemannian geometry are used in general relativity.[148] String theory makes use of several variants of geometry,[149] as does quantum information theory.[150]
+Calculus was strongly influenced by geometry.[32] For instance, the introduction of coordinates by René Descartes and the concurrent developments of algebra marked a new stage for geometry, since geometric figures such as plane curves could now be represented analytically in the form of functions and equations. This played a key role in the emergence of infinitesimal calculus in the 17th century. Analytic geometry continues to be a mainstay of pre-calculus and calculus curriculum.[151][152]
+Another important area of application is number theory.[153] In ancient Greece the Pythagoreans considered the role of numbers in geometry. However, the discovery of incommensurable lengths contradicted their philosophical views.[154] Since the 19th century, geometry has been used for solving problems in number theory, for example through the geometry of numbers or, more recently, scheme theory, which is used in Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.[155]
+"Three scientists, Ibn al-Haytham, Khayyam, and al-Tusi, had made the most considerable contribution to this branch of geometry whose importance came to be completely recognized only in the 19th century. In essence, their propositions concerning the properties of quadrangles which they considered, assuming that some of the angles of these figures were acute of obtuse, embodied the first few theorems of the hyperbolic and the elliptic geometries. Their other proposals showed that various geometric statements were equivalent to the Euclidean postulate V. It is extremely important that these scholars established the mutual connection between this postulate and the sum of the angles of a triangle and a quadrangle. By their works on the theory of parallel lines Arab mathematicians directly influenced the relevant investigations of their European counterparts. The first European attempt to prove the postulate on parallel lines – made by Witelo, the Polish scientists of the 13th century, while revising Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manazir) – was undoubtedly prompted by Arabic sources. The proofs put forward in the 14th century by the Jewish scholar Levi ben Gerson, who lived in southern France, and by the above-mentioned Alfonso from Spain directly border on Ibn al-Haytham's demonstration. Above, we have demonstrated that Pseudo-Tusi's Exposition of Euclid had stimulated both J. Wallis's and G. Saccheri's studies of the theory of parallel lines."
+"Geometry" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 11 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 675–736.

en/2171.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@

+Geometry (from the Ancient Greek: γεωμετρία; geo- "earth", -metron "measurement") is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space.[1] A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.
+Geometry arose independently in a number of early cultures as a practical way for dealing with lengths, areas, and volumes.[1] Geometry began to see elements of formal mathematical science emerging in Greek mathematics as early as the 6th century BC.[2] By the 3rd century BC, geometry was put into an axiomatic form by Euclid, whose treatment, The Elements, set a standard for many centuries to follow.[3] Geometry arose independently in India, with texts providing rules for geometric constructions appearing as early as the 3rd century BC.[4] Islamic scientists preserved Greek ideas and expanded on them during the Middle Ages.[5] By the early 17th century, geometry had been put on a solid analytic footing by mathematicians such as René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat. Since then, and into modern times, geometry has expanded into non-Euclidean geometry and manifolds, describing spaces that lie beyond the normal range of human experience.[6]
+While geometry has evolved significantly throughout the years, there are some general concepts that are fundamental to geometry. These include the concepts of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as well as the more advanced notions of topology and manifold.[7]
+Geometry has applications to many fields, including art, architecture, physics, as well as to other branches of mathematics.[8]
+The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 2nd millennium BC.[9][10] Early geometry was a collection of empirically discovered principles concerning lengths, angles, areas, and volumes, which were developed to meet some practical need in surveying, construction, astronomy, and various crafts. The earliest known texts on geometry are the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus (2000–1800 BC) and Moscow Papyrus (c. 1890 BC), the Babylonian clay tablets such as Plimpton 322 (1900 BC). For example, the Moscow Papyrus gives a formula for calculating the volume of a truncated pyramid, or frustum.[11] Later clay tablets (350–50 BC) demonstrate that Babylonian astronomers implemented trapezoid procedures for computing Jupiter's position and motion within time-velocity space. These geometric procedures anticipated the Oxford Calculators, including the mean speed theorem, by 14 centuries.[12] South of Egypt the ancient Nubians established a system of geometry including early versions of sun clocks.[13][14]
+In the 7th century BC, the Greek mathematician Thales of Miletus used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore.  He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales' Theorem.[2] Pythagoras established the Pythagorean School, which is credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean theorem,[15]  though the statement of the theorem has a long history.[16][17] Eudoxus (408–c. 355 BC) developed the method of exhaustion, which allowed the calculation of areas and volumes of curvilinear figures,[18] as well as a theory of ratios that avoided the problem of incommensurable magnitudes, which enabled subsequent geometers to make significant advances. Around 300 BC, geometry was revolutionized by Euclid, whose Elements, widely considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time,[19] introduced mathematical rigor through the axiomatic method and is the earliest example of the format still used in mathematics today, that of definition, axiom, theorem, and proof. Although most of the contents of the Elements were already known, Euclid arranged them into a single, coherent logical framework.[20] The Elements was known to all educated people in the West until the middle of the 20th century and its contents are still taught in geometry classes today.[21] Archimedes (c. 287–212 BC) of Syracuse used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave remarkably accurate approximations of Pi.[22] He also studied the spiral bearing his name and obtained formulas for the volumes of surfaces of revolution.
+Indian mathematicians also made many important contributions in geometry. The Satapatha Brahmana (3rd century BC) contains rules for ritual geometric constructions that are similar to the Sulba Sutras.[4] According to (Hayashi 2005, p. 363), the Śulba Sūtras contain "the earliest extant verbal expression of the Pythagorean Theorem in the world, although it had already been known to the Old Babylonians. They contain lists of Pythagorean triples,[23] which are particular cases of Diophantine equations.[24]
+In the Bakhshali manuscript, there is a handful of geometric problems (including problems about volumes of irregular solids). The Bakhshali manuscript also "employs a decimal place value system with a dot for zero."[25] Aryabhata's Aryabhatiya (499) includes the computation of areas and volumes.
+Brahmagupta wrote his astronomical work Brāhma Sphuṭa Siddhānta in 628. Chapter 12, containing 66 Sanskrit verses, was divided into two sections: "basic operations" (including cube roots, fractions, ratio and proportion, and barter) and "practical mathematics" (including mixture, mathematical series, plane figures, stacking bricks, sawing of timber, and piling of grain).[26] In the latter section, he stated his famous theorem on the diagonals of a cyclic quadrilateral. Chapter 12 also included a formula for the area of a cyclic quadrilateral (a generalization of Heron's formula), as well as a complete description of rational triangles (i.e. triangles with rational sides and rational areas).[26]
+In the Middle Ages, mathematics in medieval Islam contributed to the development of geometry, especially algebraic geometry.[27][28] Al-Mahani (b. 853) conceived the idea of reducing geometrical problems such as duplicating the cube to problems in algebra.[29] Thābit ibn Qurra (known as Thebit in Latin) (836–901) dealt with arithmetic operations applied to ratios of geometrical quantities, and contributed to the development of analytic geometry.[5] Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) found geometric solutions to cubic equations.[30]  The theorems of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Omar Khayyam and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi on quadrilaterals, including the Lambert quadrilateral and Saccheri quadrilateral, were early results in hyperbolic geometry, and along with their alternative postulates, such as Playfair's axiom, these works had a considerable influence on the development of non-Euclidean geometry among later European geometers, including Witelo (c. 1230–c. 1314), Gersonides (1288–1344), Alfonso, John Wallis, and Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri.[31]
+In the early 17th century, there were two important developments in geometry. The first was the creation of analytic geometry, or geometry with coordinates and equations, by René Descartes (1596–1650) and Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665).[32] This was a necessary precursor to the development of calculus and a precise quantitative science of physics.[33] The second geometric development of this period was the systematic study of projective geometry by Girard Desargues (1591–1661).[34] Projective geometry studies properties of shapes which are unchanged under projections and sections, especially as they relate to artistic perspective.[35]
+Two developments in geometry in the 19th century changed the way it had been studied previously.[36] These were the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, János Bolyai and Carl Friedrich Gauss and of the formulation of symmetry as the central consideration in the Erlangen Programme of Felix Klein (which generalized the Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries). Two of the master geometers of the time were Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), working primarily with tools from mathematical analysis, and introducing the Riemann surface, and Henri Poincaré, the founder of algebraic topology and the geometric theory of dynamical systems. As a consequence of these major changes in the conception of geometry, the concept of "space" became something rich and varied, and the natural background for theories as different as complex analysis and classical mechanics.[37]
+The following are some of the most important concepts in geometry.[7][38][39]
+Euclid took an abstract approach to geometry in his Elements,[40] one of the most influential books ever written.[41] Euclid introduced certain axioms, or postulates, expressing primary or self-evident properties of points, lines, and planes.[42] He proceeded to rigorously deduce other properties by mathematical reasoning. The characteristic feature of Euclid's approach to geometry was its rigor, and it has come to be known as axiomatic or synthetic geometry.[43] At the start of the 19th century, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856), János Bolyai (1802–1860), Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and others[44] led to a revival of interest in this discipline, and in the 20th century, David Hilbert (1862–1943) employed axiomatic reasoning in an attempt to provide a modern foundation of geometry.[45]
+Points are considered fundamental objects in Euclidean geometry. They have been defined in a variety of ways, including Euclid's definition as 'that which has no part'[46] and through the use of algebra or nested sets.[47] In many areas of geometry, such as analytic geometry, differential geometry, and topology, all objects are considered to be built up from points. However, there has been some study of geometry without reference to points.[48]
+Euclid described a line as "breadthless length" which "lies equally with respect to the points on itself".[46] In modern mathematics, given the multitude of geometries, the concept of a line is closely tied to the way the geometry is described. For instance, in analytic geometry, a line in the plane is often defined as the set of points whose coordinates satisfy a given linear equation,[49] but in a more abstract setting, such as incidence geometry, a line may be an independent object, distinct from the set of points which lie on it.[50] In differential geometry, a geodesic is a generalization of the notion of a line to curved spaces.[51]
+A plane is a flat, two-dimensional surface that extends infinitely far.[46] Planes are used in every area of geometry. For instance, planes can be studied as a topological surface without reference to distances or angles;[52] it can be studied as an affine space, where collinearity and ratios can be studied but not distances;[53] it can be studied as the complex plane using techniques of complex analysis;[54] and so on.
+Euclid defines a plane angle as the inclination to each other, in a plane, of two lines which meet each other, and do not lie straight with respect to each other.[46] In modern terms, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle.[55]
+In Euclidean geometry, angles are used to study polygons and triangles, as well as forming an object of study in their own right.[46] The study of the angles of a triangle or of angles in a unit circle forms the basis of trigonometry.[56]
+In differential geometry and calculus, the angles between plane curves or space curves or surfaces can be calculated using the derivative.[57][58]
+A curve is a 1-dimensional object that may be straight (like a line) or not; curves in 2-dimensional space are called plane curves and those in 3-dimensional space are called space curves.[59]
+In topology, a curve is defined by a function from an interval of the real numbers to another space.[52] In differential geometry, the same definition is used, but the defining function is required to be differentiable [60] Algebraic geometry studies algebraic curves, which are defined as algebraic varieties of dimension one.[61]
+A surface is a two-dimensional object, such as a sphere or paraboloid.[62] In differential geometry[60] and topology,[52] surfaces are described by two-dimensional 'patches' (or neighborhoods) that are assembled by diffeomorphisms or homeomorphisms, respectively. In algebraic geometry, surfaces are described by polynomial equations.[61]
+A manifold is a generalization of the concepts of curve and surface. In topology, a manifold is a topological space where every point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to Euclidean space.[52] In differential geometry, a differentiable manifold is a space where each neighborhood is diffeomorphic to Euclidean space.[60]
+Manifolds are used extensively in physics, including in general relativity and string theory.[63]
+Length, area, and volume describe the size or extent of an object in one dimension, two dimension, and three dimensions respectively.[64]
+In Euclidean geometry and analytic geometry, the length of a line segment can often be calculated by the Pythagorean theorem.[65]
+Area and volume can be defined as fundamental quantities separate from length, or they can be described and calculated in terms of lengths in a plane or 3-dimensional space.[64] Mathematicians have found many explicit formulas for area and formulas for volume of various geometric objects. In calculus, area and volume can be defined in terms of integrals, such as the Riemann integral[66] or the Lebesgue integral.[67]
+The concept of length or distance can be generalized, leading to the idea of metrics.[68] For instance, the Euclidean metric measures the distance between points in the Euclidean plane, while the hyperbolic metric measures the distance in the hyperbolic plane. Other important examples of metrics include the Lorentz metric of special relativity and the semi-Riemannian metrics of general relativity.[69]
+In a different direction, the concepts of length, area and volume are extended by measure theory, which studies methods of assigning a size or measure to sets, where the measures follow rules similar to those of classical area and volume.[70]
+Congruence and similarity are concepts that describe when two shapes have similar characteristics.[71] In Euclidean geometry, similarity is used to describe objects that have the same shape, while congruence is used to describe objects that are the same in both size and shape.[72] Hilbert, in his work on creating a more rigorous foundation for geometry, treated congruence as an undefined term whose properties are defined by axioms.
+Congruence and similarity are generalized in transformation geometry, which studies the properties of geometric objects that are preserved by different kinds of transformations.[73]
+Classical geometers paid special attention to constructing geometric objects that had been described in some other way. Classically, the only instruments allowed in geometric constructions are the compass and straightedge. Also, every construction had to be complete in a finite number of steps. However, some problems turned out to be difficult or impossible to solve by these means alone, and ingenious constructions using parabolas and other curves, as well as mechanical devices, were found.
+Where the traditional geometry allowed dimensions 1 (a line), 2 (a plane) and 3 (our ambient world conceived of as three-dimensional space), mathematicians and physicists have used higher dimensions for nearly two centuries.[74] One example of a mathematical use for higher dimensions is the configuration space of a physical system, which has a dimension equal to the system's degrees of freedom. For instance, the configuration of a screw can be described by five coordinates.[75]
+In general topology, the concept of dimension has been extended from natural numbers, to infinite dimension (Hilbert spaces, for example) and  positive real numbers (in fractal geometry).[76] In algebraic geometry, the dimension of an algebraic variety has received a number of apparently different definitions, which are all equivalent in the most common cases.[77]
+The theme of symmetry in geometry is nearly as old as the science of geometry itself.[78] Symmetric shapes such as the circle, regular polygons and platonic solids held deep significance for many ancient philosophers[79] and were investigated in detail before the time of Euclid.[42] Symmetric patterns occur in nature and were artistically rendered in a multitude of forms, including the graphics of da Vinci, M.C. Escher, and others.[80] In the second half of the 19th century, the relationship between symmetry and geometry came under intense scrutiny. Felix Klein's Erlangen program proclaimed that, in a very precise sense, symmetry, expressed via the notion of a transformation group, determines what geometry is.[81] Symmetry in classical Euclidean geometry is represented by congruences and rigid motions, whereas in projective geometry an analogous role is played by collineations, geometric transformations that take straight lines into straight lines.[82] However it was in the new geometries of Bolyai and Lobachevsky, Riemann, Clifford and Klein, and Sophus Lie that Klein's idea to 'define a geometry via its symmetry group' found its inspiration.[83] Both discrete and continuous symmetries play prominent roles in geometry, the former in topology and geometric group theory,[84][85] the latter in Lie theory and Riemannian geometry.[86][87]
+A different type of symmetry is the principle of duality  in projective geometry, among other fields. This meta-phenomenon can roughly be described as follows: in any theorem, exchange point with plane, join with meet, lies in with contains, and the result is an equally true theorem.[88] A similar and closely related form of duality exists between a vector space and its dual space.[89]
+Euclidean geometry is geometry in its classical sense.[90] As it models the space of the physical world, it is used in many scientific areas, such as mechanics, astronomy, crystallography,[91] and many technical fields, such as engineering,[92] architecture,[93] geodesy,[94] aerodynamics,[95] and navigation.[96] The mandatory educational curriculum of the majority of nations includes the study of Euclidean concepts such as points, lines, planes, angles, triangles, congruence, similarity, solid figures, circles, and analytic geometry.[38]
+Differential geometry uses techniques of calculus and linear algebra to study problems in geometry.[97] It has applications in physics,[98] econometrics,[99] and bioinformatics,[100] among others.
+In particular, differential geometry is of importance to mathematical physics due to Albert Einstein's general relativity postulation that the universe is curved.[101] Differential geometry can either be intrinsic (meaning that the spaces it considers are smooth manifolds whose geometric structure is governed by a Riemannian metric, which determines how distances are measured near each point) or extrinsic (where the object under study is a part of some ambient flat Euclidean space).[102]
+Euclidean geometry was not the only historical form of geometry studied. Spherical geometry has long been used by astronomers, astrologers, and navigators.[103]
+Immanuel Kant argued that there is only one, absolute, geometry, which is known to be true a priori by an inner faculty of mind: Euclidean geometry was synthetic a priori.[104]  This view was at first somewhat challenged by thinkers such as Saccheri, then finally overturned by the revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the works of Bolyai, Lobachevsky, and Gauss (who never published his theory).[105] They demonstrated that ordinary Euclidean space is only one possibility for development of geometry. A broad vision of the subject of geometry was then expressed  by Riemann in his 1867 inauguration lecture Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (On the hypotheses on which geometry is based),[106] published only after his death. Riemann's new idea of space proved crucial in Albert Einstein's general relativity theory. Riemannian geometry, which considers very general spaces in which the notion of length is defined, is a mainstay of modern geometry.[83]
+Topology is the field concerned with the properties of continuous mappings,[107] and can be considered a generalization of Euclidean geometry.[108] In practice, topology often means dealing with large-scale properties of spaces, such as connectedness and compactness.[52]
+The field of topology, which saw massive development in the 20th century, is in a technical sense a type of transformation geometry, in which transformations are homeomorphisms.[109] This has often been expressed in the form of the saying 'topology is rubber-sheet geometry'. Subfields of topology include geometric topology, differential topology, algebraic topology and general topology.[110]
+The field of algebraic geometry developed from the Cartesian geometry of co-ordinates.[111] It underwent periodic periods of growth, accompanied by the creation and study of projective geometry, birational geometry, algebraic varieties, and commutative algebra, among other topics.[112] From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s it had undergone major foundational development, largely due to work of Jean-Pierre Serre and Alexander Grothendieck.[112] This led to the introduction of schemes and greater emphasis on topological methods, including various cohomology theories. One of seven Millennium Prize problems, the Hodge conjecture, is a question in algebraic geometry.[113] Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem uses advanced methods of algebraic geometry for solving a long-standing problem of number theory.
+In general, algebraic geometry studies geometry through the use of concepts in commutative algebra such as multivariate polynomials.[114] It has applications in many areas, including cryptography[115] and string theory.[116]
+Complex geometry studies the nature of geometric structures modelled on, or arising out of, the complex plane.[117][118][119] Complex geometry lies at the intersection of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and analysis of several complex variables, and has found applications to string theory and mirror symmetry.[120]
+Complex geometry first appeared as a distinct area of study in the work of Bernhard Riemann in his study of Riemann surfaces.[121][122][123] Work in the spirit of Riemann was carried out by the Italian school of algebraic geometry in the early 1900s. Contemporary treatment of complex geometry began with the work of Jean-Pierre Serre, who introduced the concept of sheaves to the subject, and illuminated the relations between complex geometry and algebraic geometry.[124][125]
+The primary objects of study in complex geometry are complex manifolds, complex algebraic varieties, and complex analytic varieties, and holomorphic vector bundles and coherent sheaves over these spaces. Special examples of spaces studied in complex geometry include Riemann surfaces, and Calabi-Yau manifolds, and these spaces find uses in string theory. In particular, worldsheets of strings are modelled by Riemann surfaces, and superstring theory predicts that the extra 6 dimensions of 10 dimensional spacetime may be modelled by Calabi-Yau manifolds.
+Discrete geometry is a subject that has close connections with convex geometry.[126][127][128] It is concerned mainly with questions of relative position of simple geometric objects, such as points, lines and circles. Examples include the study of sphere packings, triangulations, the Kneser-Poulsen conjecture, etc.[129][130] It shares many methods and principles with combinatorics.
+Computational geometry deals with algorithms and their implementations for manipulating geometrical objects. Important problems historically have included the travelling salesman problem, minimum spanning trees, hidden-line removal, and linear programming.[131]
+Although being a young area of geometry, it has many applications in computer vision, image processing, computer-aided design, medical imaging, etc.[132]
+Geometric group theory uses large-scale geometric techniques to study finitely generated groups.[133] It is closely connected to low-dimensional topology, such as in Grigori Perelman's proof of the Geometrization conjecture, which included the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, a Millennium Prize Problem.[134]
+Geometric group theory often revolves around the Cayley graph, which is a geometric representation of a group. Other important topics include quasi-isometries, Gromov-hyperbolic groups, and right angled Artin groups.[133][135]
+Convex geometry investigates convex shapes in the Euclidean space and its more abstract analogues, often using techniques of real analysis and discrete mathematics.[136] It has close connections to convex analysis, optimization and functional analysis and important applications in number theory.
+Convex geometry dates back to antiquity.[136] Archimedes gave the first known precise definition of convexity. The isoperimetric problem, a recurring concept in convex geometry, was studied by the Greeks as well, including Zenodorus. Archimedes, Plato, Euclid, and later Kepler and Coxeter all studied convex polytopes and their properties. From the 19th century on, mathematicians have studied other areas of convex mathematics, including higher-dimensional polytopes, volume and surface area of convex bodies, Gaussian curvature, algorithms, tilings and lattices.
+Geometry has found applications in many fields, some of which are described below.
+Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. For instance, the theory of perspective showed that there is more to geometry than just the metric properties of figures: perspective is the origin of projective geometry.[137]
+Artists have long used concepts of proportion in design. Vitruvius developed a complicated theory of ideal proportions for the human figure.[138] These concepts have been used and adapted by artists from Michelangelo to modern comic book artists.[139]
+The golden ratio is a particular proportion that has had a controversial role in art. Often claimed to be the most aesthetically pleasing ratio of lengths, it is frequently stated to be incorporated into famous works of art, though the most reliable and unambiguous examples were made deliberately by artists aware of this legend.[140]
+Tilings, or tessellations, have been used in art throughout history. Islamic art makes frequent use of tessellations, as did the art of Escher.[141] Escher's work also made use of hyperbolic geometry.
+Cézanne advanced the theory that all images can be built up from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. This is still used in art theory today, although the exact list of shapes varies from author to author.[142][143]
+Geometry has many applications in architecture. In fact, it has been said that geometry lies at the core of architectural design.[144][145] Applications of geometry to architecture include the use of projective geometry to create forced perspective,[146] the use of conic sections in constructing domes and similar objects,[93] the use of tessellations,[93] and the use of symmetry.[93]
+The field of astronomy, especially as it relates to mapping the positions of stars and planets on the celestial sphere and describing the relationship between movements of celestial bodies, have served as an important source of geometric problems throughout history.[147]
+Riemannian geometry and pseudo-Riemannian geometry are used in general relativity.[148] String theory makes use of several variants of geometry,[149] as does quantum information theory.[150]
+Calculus was strongly influenced by geometry.[32] For instance, the introduction of coordinates by René Descartes and the concurrent developments of algebra marked a new stage for geometry, since geometric figures such as plane curves could now be represented analytically in the form of functions and equations. This played a key role in the emergence of infinitesimal calculus in the 17th century. Analytic geometry continues to be a mainstay of pre-calculus and calculus curriculum.[151][152]
+Another important area of application is number theory.[153] In ancient Greece the Pythagoreans considered the role of numbers in geometry. However, the discovery of incommensurable lengths contradicted their philosophical views.[154] Since the 19th century, geometry has been used for solving problems in number theory, for example through the geometry of numbers or, more recently, scheme theory, which is used in Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.[155]
+"Three scientists, Ibn al-Haytham, Khayyam, and al-Tusi, had made the most considerable contribution to this branch of geometry whose importance came to be completely recognized only in the 19th century. In essence, their propositions concerning the properties of quadrangles which they considered, assuming that some of the angles of these figures were acute of obtuse, embodied the first few theorems of the hyperbolic and the elliptic geometries. Their other proposals showed that various geometric statements were equivalent to the Euclidean postulate V. It is extremely important that these scholars established the mutual connection between this postulate and the sum of the angles of a triangle and a quadrangle. By their works on the theory of parallel lines Arab mathematicians directly influenced the relevant investigations of their European counterparts. The first European attempt to prove the postulate on parallel lines – made by Witelo, the Polish scientists of the 13th century, while revising Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manazir) – was undoubtedly prompted by Arabic sources. The proofs put forward in the 14th century by the Jewish scholar Levi ben Gerson, who lived in southern France, and by the above-mentioned Alfonso from Spain directly border on Ibn al-Haytham's demonstration. Above, we have demonstrated that Pseudo-Tusi's Exposition of Euclid had stimulated both J. Wallis's and G. Saccheri's studies of the theory of parallel lines."
+"Geometry" . Encyclopædia Britannica. 11 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 675–736.

en/2172.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@


1	+ George Bush most commonly refers to:
2	+
3	+ George Bush may also refer to:

en/2173.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,233 @@

+George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet, peer and politician who became a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence, and is considered one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement.[1][2][3] He is regarded as one of the greatest English poets[4] and remains widely read and influential. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
+He travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in the cities of Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa. During his stay in Italy he frequently visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.[5] Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died of disease leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero.[6] He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second Siege of Missolonghi.
+His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, is regarded as a foundational figure in the field of computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.[7][8][9] Byron's illegitimate children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh.
+George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street in London – his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the English department store John Lewis.
+Byron was the only child of Captain John Byron (known as 'Jack') and his second wife Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-Admiral John Byron and Sophia Trevanion.[10]  Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Vice Admiral John Byron set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After he become embroiled in a tempestous voyage during the American Revolutionary War, John was nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack' Byron by the press.[11]
+Byron's father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia, Marchioness of Carmarthen, with whom he had been having an affair – the wedding took place just weeks after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months pregnant.[12] The marriage was not a happy one, and their first two children – Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy.[13] Amelia herself died in 1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's half-sister Augusta Mary.[14] Though Amelia succumbed to a wasting illness, probably tuberculosis, the press reported that her heart had been broken out of remorse for leaving her husband. Much later, 19th-century sources blamed Jack's own "brutal and vicious" treatment of her.[15]
+Jack then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785, by all accounts only for her fortune.[16] To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron Gordon of Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts, and in the space of two years, the large estate, worth some £23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress with an annual income in trust of only £150.[15] In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son.
+The boy was born on 22 January in lodgings at Holles Street in London, and christened at St Marylebone Parish Church as "George Gordon Byron". His father appears to have wished to call his son 'William', but as her husband remained absent, his mother named him after her own father George Gordon of Gight.[17] (His grandfather was a descendant of James I of Scotland, and had committed suicide in 1779.)[18]
+Catherine moved back to Aberdeenshire in 1790, where Byron spent his childhood.[18] His father soon joined them in their lodgings in Queen Street, but the couple quickly separated. Catherine regularly experienced mood swings and bouts of melancholy,[18] which could be partly explained by her husband's continuingly borrowing money from her. As a result, she fell even further into debt to support his demands. It was one of these importunate loans that allowed him to travel to Valenciennes, France, where he died of a "long & suffering illness" – probably tuberculosis – in 1791.[19]
+When Byron's great-uncle, who was posthumously labelled the "wicked" Lord Byron, died on 21 May 1798, the 10-year-old boy became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale and inherited the ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire. His mother proudly took him to England, but the Abbey was in an embarrassing state of disrepair and, rather than living there, she decided to lease it to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, among others, during Byron's adolescence.
+Described as "a woman without judgment or self-command," Catherine either spoiled and indulged her son or vexed him with her capricious stubbornness. Her drinking disgusted him and he often mocked her for being short and corpulent, which made it difficult for her to catch him to discipline him. Byron had been born with a deformed right foot; his mother once retaliated and, in a fit of temper, referred to him as "a lame brat."[20] However, Byron's biographer, Doris Langley-Moore, in her 1974 book, Accounts Rendered, paints a more sympathetic view of Mrs Byron, showing how she was a staunch supporter of her son and sacrificed her own precarious finances to keep him in luxury at Harrow and Cambridge. Langley-Moore questions 19th-century biographer John Galt's claim that she over-indulged in alcohol.
+Upon the death of Byron's mother-in-law Judith Noel, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, in 1822, her will required that he change his surname to "Noel" so as to inherit half of her estate. He obtained a Royal Warrant, allowing him to "take and use the surname of Noel only" and to "subscribe the said surname of Noel before all titles of honour". From that point he signed himself "Noel Byron" (the usual signature of a peer being merely the peerage, in this case simply "Byron"). It is speculated that this was so that his initials would read "N.B.", mimicking those of his hero, Napoleon Bonaparte. Lady Byron eventually succeeded to the Barony of Wentworth, becoming "Lady Wentworth".
+Byron received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School, and in August 1799 entered the school of Dr. William Glennie, in Dulwich.[21] Placed under the care of a Dr. Bailey, he was encouraged to exercise in moderation but could not restrain himself from "violent" bouts in an attempt to overcompensate for his deformed foot. His mother interfered with his studies, often withdrawing him from school, with the result that he lacked discipline and his classical studies were neglected.
+In 1801, he was sent to Harrow, where he remained until July 1805.[18] An undistinguished student and an unskilled cricketer, he did represent the school during the very first Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805.[22]
+His lack of moderation was not restricted to physical exercise. Byron fell in love with Mary Chaworth, whom he met while at school,[18] and she was the reason he refused to return to Harrow in September 1803. His mother wrote, "He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion. In short, the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth."[18] In Byron's later memoirs, "Mary Chaworth is portrayed as the first object of his adult sexual feelings."[23]
+Byron finally returned in January 1804,[18] to a more settled period which saw the formation of a circle of emotional involvements with other Harrow boys, which he recalled with great vividness: "My school friendships were with me passions (for I was always violent)."[24] The most enduring of those was with John FitzGibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare—four years Byron's junior—whom he was to meet unexpectedly many years later in Italy (1821).[25] His nostalgic poems about his Harrow friendships, Childish Recollections (1806), express a prescient "consciousness of sexual differences that may in the end make England untenable to him."[26] Letters to Byron in the John Murray archive contain evidence[citation needed] of a previously unremarked if short-lived romantic relationship with a younger boy at Harrow, John Thomas Claridge.
+The following autumn, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge,[27] where he met and formed a close friendship with the younger John Edleston. About his "protégé" he wrote, "He has been my almost constant associate since October, 1805, when I entered Trinity College. His voice first attracted my attention, his countenance fixed it, and his manners attached me to him for ever." In his memory Byron composed Thyrza, a series of elegies.[28] In later years, he described the affair as "a violent, though pure love and passion". This statement, however, needs to be read in the context of hardening public attitudes toward homosexuality in England and the severe sanctions (including public hanging) against convicted or even suspected offenders.[29] The liaison, on the other hand, may well have been "pure" out of respect for Edleston's innocence, in contrast to the (probably) more sexually overt relations experienced at Harrow School.[30] The poem "The Cornelian" was written about the cornelian that Byron received from Edleston.[31]
+Byron spent three years at Trinity College, engaging in sexual escapades, boxing, horse riding and gambling.[32] Also while at Cambridge he formed lifelong friendships with men such as John Cam Hobhouse, who initiated him into the Cambridge Whig Club, which endorsed liberal politics,[32] and Francis Hodgson, a Fellow at King's College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters until the end of his life.
+While not at school or college, Byron dwelt at his mother's residence Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire.[18] While there, he cultivated friendships with Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and her brother, John, with whom he staged two plays for the entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to write his first volumes of poetry. Fugitive Pieces was printed by Ridge of Newark, which contained poems written when Byron was only 17.[33] However, it was promptly recalled and burned on the advice of his friend, the Reverend J. T. Becher, on account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem To Mary.[34]
+Hours of Idleness, which collected many of the previous poems, along with more recent compositions, was the culminating book. The savage, anonymous criticism this received (now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham) in the Edinburgh Review prompted his first major satire,[35] English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). It was put into the hands of his relation, R. C. Dallas, requesting him to "...get it published without his name."[36] Alexander Dallas gave a large series of changes and alterations, as well as the reasoning for some of them. He also stated that Byron had originally intended to prefix an argument to this poem, and Dallas quoted it.[37] Although the work was published anonymously, by April, R. C. Dallas wrote that "you are already pretty generally known to be the author."[38] The work so upset some of his critics they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in subsequent editions, it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.[35]
+After his return from travels he again entrusted R. C. Dallas as his literary agent to publish his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron thought of little account. The first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published in 1812 and were received with acclaim.[39][40] In his own words, "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."[41] He followed up his success with the poem's last two cantos, as well as four equally celebrated "Oriental Tales": The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara. About the same time, he began his intimacy with his future biographer, Thomas Moore.
+Byron racked up numerous debts as a young man, owing to what his mother termed a "reckless disregard for money".[18] She lived at Newstead during this time, in fear of her son's creditors.[18] He had planned to spend early 1808 cruising with his cousin, George Bettesworth, who was captain of the 32-gun frigate HMS Tartar. Bettesworth's death at the Battle of Alvøen in May 1808 made that impossible.
+From 1809 to 1811,[42] Byron went on the Grand Tour, then customary for a young nobleman. He travelled with Hobhouse for the first year and his entourage of servants included Byron's trustworthy valet, William Fletcher. Fletcher was often the butt of Hobhouse and Byron’s humour. The Napoleonic Wars forced him to avoid most of Europe, and he instead turned to the Mediterranean. The journey provided the opportunity to flee creditors, as well as a former love, Mary Chaworth (the subject of his poem from this time, "To a Lady: On Being Asked My Reason for Quitting England in the Spring").[35] Letters to Byron from his friend Charles Skinner Matthews reveal that a key motive was also the hope of homosexual experience.[43] Attraction to the Levant was probably also a reason; he had read about the Ottoman and Persian lands as a child, was attracted to Islam (especially Sufi mysticism), and later wrote, "With these countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end."[44][45]
+Byron began his trip in Portugal from where he wrote a letter to his friend Mr Hodgson in which he describes his mastery of the Portuguese language, consisting mainly of swearing and insults. Byron particularly enjoyed his stay in Sintra that is described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage as "glorious Eden". From Lisbon he travelled overland to Seville, Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, and Gibraltar, and from there by sea on to Malta and Greece.[46]
+While in Athens, Byron met 14-year-old Nicolo Giraud, with whom he became quite close and who taught him Italian. It has been suggested that the two had an intimate relationship involving a sexual affair.[47] Byron sent Giraud to school at a monastery in Malta and bequeathed him a sizeable sum of £7,000 pounds sterling. The will, however, was later cancelled.[48] "I am tired of pl & opt Cs, the last thing I could be tired of", Byron wrote to Hobhouse from Athens (an abbreviation of "coitum plenum et optabilem" – complete intercourse to one's heart's desire, from Petronius' Satyricon), which, as an earlier letter establishes, was their shared code for homosexual experience.[49]
+In 1810 in Athens, Byron wrote "Maid of Athens, ere we part" for a 12-year-old girl, Teresa Makri (1798–1875).
+Byron and Hobhouse made their way to Smyrna, where they cadged a ride to Constantinople on HMS Salsette. While Salsette was anchored awaiting Ottoman permission to dock at the city, on 3 May 1810 Byron and Lieutenant Ekenhead, of Salsette's Marines, swam the Hellespont. Byron commemorated this feat in the second canto of Don Juan. He returned to England from Malta in July 1811 aboard HMS Volage.
+Byron became a celebrity with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812). "He rapidly became the most brilliant star in the dazzling world of Regency London. He was sought after at every society venue, elected to several exclusive clubs, and frequented the most fashionable London drawing-rooms."[21] During this period in England he produced many works, including The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos (1813), Parisina, and The Siege of Corinth (1815). On the initiative of the composer Isaac Nathan, he produced in 1814–1815 the Hebrew Melodies (including what became some of his best-known lyrics, such as "She Walks in Beauty" and "The Destruction of Sennacherib"). Involved at first in an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb (who called him "mad, bad and dangerous to know") and with other lovers and also pressed by debt, he began to seek a suitable marriage, considering – amongst others – Annabella Millbanke. However, in 1813 he met for the first time in four years his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Rumours of incest surrounded the pair; Augusta's daughter Medora (b. 1814) was suspected to have been Byron's. To escape from growing debts and rumours, Byron pressed his determination to marry Annabella, who was said to be the likely heiress of a rich uncle. They married on 2 January 1815, and their daughter, Ada, was born in December of that year. However, Byron's continuing obsession with Augusta (and his continuing sexual escapades with actresses such as Charlotte Mardyn[50][51] and others) made their marital life a misery. Annabella considered Byron insane, and in January 1816 she left him, taking their daughter, and began proceedings for a legal separation. Their separation was made legal in a private settlement in March 1816. The scandal of the separation, the rumours about Augusta, and ever-increasing debts forced him to leave England in April 1816, never to return.[21]
+Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819
+Mary Shelley, 1840
+Claire Clairmont
+After this break-up of his domestic life, Byron left England and never returned. (Despite his dying wishes, however, his body was returned for burial in England.) He journeyed through Belgium and continued up the Rhine river. In the summer of 1816 he settled at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with his personal physician, John William Polidori. There Byron befriended the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley's future wife, Mary Godwin. He was also joined by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with whom he had had an affair in London.[52] Several times Byron went to see Germaine de Staël and her Coppet group, which turned out to be a valid intellectual and emotional support to Byron at the time.[53]
+Kept indoors at the Villa Diodati by the "incessant rain" of "that wet, ungenial summer" over three days in June, the five turned to reading fantastical stories, including Fantasmagoriana, and then devising their own tales. Mary Shelley produced what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, and Polidori produced The Vampyre,[54] the progenitor of the Romantic vampire genre.[55][56] The Vampyre was the inspiration for a fragmentary story of Byron's, "A Fragment".[57]
+Byron's story fragment was published as a postscript to Mazeppa; he also wrote the third canto of Childe Harold.
+Byron wintered in Venice, pausing his travels when he fell in love with Marianna Segati, in whose Venice house he was lodging, and who was soon replaced by 22-year-old Margarita Cogni; both women were married.[58] Cogni could not read or write, and she left her husband to move into Byron's Venice house.[58] Their fighting often caused Byron to spend the night in his gondola; when he asked her to leave the house, she threw herself into the Venetian canal.[58]
+In 1816, Byron visited San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, where he acquainted himself with Armenian culture with the help of the monks belonging to the Mechitarist Order. With the help of Father Pascal Aucher (Harutiun Avkerian), he learned the Armenian language[58] and attended many seminars about language and history. He co-authored Grammar English and Armenian in 1817, an English textbook written by Aucher and corrected by Byron, and A Grammar Armenian and English in 1819, a project he initiated of a grammar of Classical Armenian for English speakers, where he included quotations from classical and modern Armenian.[58]
+Byron later participated in the compilation of the English Armenian dictionary (Barraran angleren yev hayeren, 1821) and wrote the preface, in which he explained Armenian oppression by the Turkish pashas and the Persian satraps and the Armenian struggle of liberation. His two main translations are the Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, two chapters of Movses Khorenatsi's History of Armenia, and sections of Nerses of Lambron's Orations.[59]
+His fascination was so great that he even considered a replacement of the Cain story of the Bible with that of the legend of Armenian patriarch Haik.[59] He may be credited with the birth of Armenology and its propagation.[59] His profound lyricism and ideological courage has inspired many Armenian poets, the likes of Ghevond Alishan, Smbat Shahaziz, Hovhannes Tumanyan, Ruben Vorberian, and others.[59]
+In 1817, he journeyed to Rome. On returning to Venice, he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold. About the same time, he sold Newstead and published Manfred, Cain, and The Deformed Transformed. The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820. During this period he met the 18-year-old Countess Guiccioli, who found her first love in Byron, and asked her to elope with him.[58]
+Led by love for the local aristocratic, young, and newly married Teresa Guiccioli, Byron lived in Ravenna from 1819 to 1821. Here he continued Don Juan and wrote the Ravenna Diary and My Dictionary and Recollections. Around this time he received visits from Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as from Thomas Moore, to whom he confided his autobiography or "life and adventures", which Moore, Hobhouse, and Byron's publisher, John Murray,[58] burned in 1824, a month after Byron's death.[39] Of Byron's lifestyle in Ravenna we know more from Shelley, who documented some of its more colourful aspects in a letter: "Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes."[60]
+In 1821 Byron left Ravenna and went to live in the Tuscan city of Pisa, to which Teresa had also relocated. From 1821 to 1822, Byron finished Cantos 6–12 of Don Juan at Pisa, and in the same year he joined with Leigh Hunt and Shelley in starting a short-lived newspaper, The Liberal, in whose first number The Vision of Judgment appeared. For the first time since his arrival in Italy, Byron found himself tempted to give dinner parties; his guests included the Shelleys, Edward Ellerker Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and Edward John Trelawny; and "never", as Shelley said, "did he display himself to more advantage than on these occasions; being at once polite and cordial, full of social hilarity and the most perfect good humour; never diverging into ungraceful merriment, and yet keeping up the spirit of liveliness throughout the evening."[61]
+Shelley and Williams rented a house on the coast and had a schooner built. Byron decided to have his own yacht, and engaged Trelawny's friend, Captain Daniel Roberts, to design and construct the boat. Named the Bolivar, it was later sold to Charles John Gardiner, 1st Earl of Blessington, and Marguerite, Countess of Blessington, when Byron left for Greece in 1823.[62][63]
+Byron attended the funeral of Shelley, which was orchestrated by Trelawny after Williams and Shelley drowned in a boating accident on 8 July 1822. His last Italian home was Genoa. While living there he was accompanied by the Countess Guiccioli and the Blessingtons. Lady Blessington based much of the material in her book, Conversations with Lord Byron, on the time spent together there. This book became an important biographical text about Byron’s life just prior to his death.
+Byron was living in Genoa when, in 1823, while growing bored with his life there, he accepted overtures for his support from representatives of the movement for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire.[64] At first, Byron did not wish to leave his 22-year-old mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, who had abandoned her husband to live with him; ultimately Guiccioli's father, Count Gamba, was allowed to leave his exile in the Romagna under the condition that his daughter return to him, without Byron.[65] At the same time that the philhellene Edward Blaquiere was attempting to recruit him, Byron was confused as to what he was supposed to do in Greece, writing: "Blaquiere seemed to think that I might be of some use-even here;—though what he did not exactly specify".[65] With the assistance of his banker and Captain Daniel Roberts, Byron chartered the brig Hercules to take him to Greece. When Byron left Genoa, it caused "passionate grief" from Guiccioli, who wept openly as he sailed away to Greece. The Hercules was forced to return to port shortly afterwards. When it set sail for the final time, Guiccioli had already left Genoa.[66] On 16 July, Byron left Genoa, arriving at Kefalonia in the Ionian Islands on 4 August.
+His voyage is covered in detail in Donald Prell's Sailing with Byron from Genoa to Cephalonia.[67] Prell also wrote of a coincidence in Byron's chartering the Hercules. The vessel was launched only a few miles south of Seaham Hall, where in 1815 Byron married Annabella Milbanke. Between 1815 and 1823 the vessel was in service between England and Canada. Suddenly in 1823, the ship's Captain decided to sail to Genoa and offer the Hercules for charter. After taking Byron to Greece, the ship returned to England, never again to venture into the Mediterranean. The Hercules was aged 37 when, on 21 September 1852, she went aground near Hartlepool, only 25 miles south of Sunderland, where in 1815, her keel was laid; Byron's "keel was laid" nine months before his official birth date, 22 January 1788; therefore in ship-years, he was aged 37, when he died in Missolonghi.[68]
+Byron initially stayed on the island of Kefalonia, where he was besieged by agents of the rival Greek factions, all of whom wanted to recruit Byron to their own cause.[69] The Ionian islands, of which Kefalonia is one, were under British rule until 1864. Byron spent £4,000 of his own money to refit the Greek fleet.[70] When Byron travelled to the mainland of Greece on the night of 28 December 1823, Byron's ship was surprised by an Ottoman warship, which did not attack his ship as the Ottoman captain mistook Byron's boat for a fireship.[71] To avoid the Ottoman Navy, which he encountered several times on his voyage, Byron was forced to take a roundabout route and only reached Missolonghi on 5 January 1824.[71]
+After arriving in Missolonghi, Byron joined forces with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a Greek politician with military power. Byron moved to the second floor of a two-story house and was forced to spend much of his time dealing with unruly Souliotes who demanded that Byron pay them the back-pay owed to them by the Greek government.[72] Byron gave the Souliotes some £6,000 pounds.[73] Byron was supposed to lead an attack on the Ottoman fortress of Navpaktos, whose Albanian garrison were unhappy due to pay arrears and who offered to put up only token resistance if Byron was willing to bribe them into surrendering. However, Ottoman commander Yussuf Pasha executed the mutinous Albanian officers who were offering to surrender Navpaktos to Byron and arranged to have some of the pay arrears paid out to the rest of the garrison.[74] Byron never led the attack on Navpaktos because the Souliotes kept demanding that Byron pay them more and more money before they would march; Byron grew tired of their blackmail and sent them all home on 15 February 1824.[74] Byron wrote in a note to himself: "Having tried in vain at every expence-considerable trouble—and some danger to unite the Suliotes for the good of Greece-and their own—I have come to the following resolution—I will have nothing more to do with the Suliotes-they may go to the Turks or the devil...they may cut me into more pieces than they have dissensions among them, sooner than change my resolution".[74] At the same time, Guiccioli's brother, Pietro Gamba, who had followed Byron to Greece, exasperated Byron with his incompetence as he consistently made expensive mistakes. For example, when asked to buy some cloth from Corfu, Gamba ordered the wrong cloth in excess, leading to the bill being 10 times higher than what Byron wanted.[75] Byron wrote about his right-hand man: "Gamba—who is anything but lucky—had something to do with it—and as usual—the moment he had—matters went wrong".[73]
+To help raise money for the revolution, Byron sold his estate Rochdale Manor in England, which raised some £11,250 pound sterling; this led Byron to estimate that he now had some £20,000 pounds at his disposal, all of which he planned to spend on the Greek cause.[76] In today's money Byron would have been a millionaire many times over, and the news that a fabulously wealthy British aristocrat known for his generosity in spending money had arrived in Greece made Byron the object of much solicitation in a desperately poor country like Greece.[76] Byron wrote to his business agent in England, "I should not like to give the Greeks but a half helping hand", saying he would have wanted to spend his entire fortune on Greek freedom.[76] Byron found himself besieged by various people, both Greek and foreign, who tried to persuade Byron to open up his pocketbook to support them. By the end of March 1824, the so-called "Byron brigade" of 30 philhellene officers and about 200 men had been formed, paid for entirely by Byron.[77] Leadership of the Greek cause in the Roumeli region was divided between two rival leaders: a former Klepht (bandit), Odysseas Androutsos; and a wealthy Phanariot merchant, Alexandros Mavrokordatos. Byron used his prestige to attempt to persuade the two rival leaders to come together to focus on defeating the Ottomans.[78] At same time, other leaders of the Greek factions like Petrobey Mavromichalis and Theodoros Kolokotronis wrote letters to Byron telling him to disregard all of the Roumeliot leaders and to come to their respective areas in the Peloponnese. This drove Byron to distraction; he complained that the Greeks were hopelessly disunited and spent more time feuding with each other than trying to win independence.[79] Byron's friend Edward John Trelawny had aligned himself with Androutsos, who ruled Athens, and was now pressing for Byron to break with Mavrokordatos in favour of backing his rival Androutsos.[77] Androutsos, having won over Trelawny to his cause, was now anxious to persuade Byron to put his wealth behind his claim to be the leader of Greece.[80] Byron wrote with disgust about how one of the Greek captains, former Klepht Georgios Karaiskakis, attacked Missolonghi on 3 April 1824 with some 150 men supported by the Souliotes as he was unhappy with Mavrokordatos's leadership, leading to a brief bout of inter-Greek fighting before Karaiskakis was chased away by 6 April.[81]
+Byron adopted a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl called Hato whose parents had been killed by the Greeks, whom he ultimately sent to safety in Kefalonia, knowing well that religious hatred between the Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks was running high and that any Muslim in Greece, even a child, was in serious danger.[82] Until 1934, most Turks did not have surnames, so Hato's lack of a surname was quite typical for a Turkish family at this time. During this time, Byron pursued his Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, with whom he had fallen madly in love, but the affections went unrequited.[39][82] Byron was infatuated with the teenage Chalandritsanos, whom he spoiled outrageously, spending some £600 (the equivalent to about £24,600 in today's money) to cater to his every whim over the course of six months and writing his last poems about his passion for the Greek boy, but Chalandritsanos was only interested in Byron's money.[82] When the famous Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen heard about Byron's heroics in Greece, he voluntarily resculpted his earlier bust of Byron in Greek marble.[58]
+Mavrokordatos and Byron planned to attack the Turkish-held fortress of Lepanto, at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth. Byron employed a fire-master to prepare artillery, and he took part of the rebel army under his own command, despite his lack of military experience. Before the expedition could sail, on 15 February 1824, he fell ill, and bloodletting weakened him further.[83] He made a partial recovery, but in early April he caught a violent cold, which therapeutic bleeding, insisted on by his doctors, aggravated. This treatment, carried out with unsterilised medical instruments, may have caused him to develop sepsis. He contracted a violent fever and died in Missolonghi on 19 April.[83]
+His physician at the time, Julius van Millingen, son of Dutch-English archaeologist James Millingen, was unable to prevent his death. It has been said that if Byron had lived and had gone on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been declared King of Greece. However, contemporary scholars have found such an outcome unlikely.[39] The British historian David Brewer wrote that in one sense, Byron was a failure in Greece as he failed to persuade the rival Greek factions to unite, won no victories and was successful only in the humanitarian sphere, using his great wealth to help the victims of the war, Muslim and Christian, but this did not affect the outcome of the Greek war of independence at all.[84]
+Brewer went on to argue, "In another sense, though, Byron achieved everything he could have wished. His presence in Greece, and in particular his death there, drew to the Greek cause not just the attention of sympathetic nations, but their increasing active participation...Despite the critics, Byron is primarily remembered with admiration as a poet of genius, with something approaching veneration as a symbol of high ideals, and with great affection as a man: for his courage and his ironic slant on life, for his generosity to the grandest of causes and to the humblest of individuals, for the constant interplay of judgment and sympathy. In Greece he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few Greeks are, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard epithet, megalos kai kalos, a great and good man".[85]
+Alfred Tennyson would later recall the shocked reaction in Britain when word was received of Byron's death.[39] The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a hero.[86][87] The national poet of Greece, Dionysios Solomos, wrote a poem about the unexpected loss, named To the Death of Lord Byron.[88] Βύρων, the Greek form of "Byron", continues in popularity as a masculine name in Greece, and a suburb of Athens is called Vyronas in his honour.
+Byron's body was embalmed, but the Greeks wanted some part of their hero to stay with them. According to some sources, his heart remained at Missolonghi.[89] His other remains were sent to England (accompanied by his faithful manservant, "Tita") for burial in Westminster Abbey, but the Abbey refused for reason of "questionable morality".[39][90] Huge crowds viewed his coffin as he lay in state for two days in London.[39] He is buried at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.[91] A marble slab given by the King of Greece is laid directly above Byron's grave. His daughter, Ada Lovelace, was later buried beside him.[92]
+Byron's friends raised the sum of 1,000 pounds to commission a statue of the writer; Thorvaldsen offered to sculpt it for that amount.[58] However, for ten years after the statue was completed in 1834, most British institutions turned it down, and it remained in storage. The statue was refused by the British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery[58] before Trinity College, Cambridge, finally placed the statue of Byron in its library.[58]
+In 1969, 145 years after Byron's death, a memorial to him was finally placed in Westminster Abbey.[93][94] The memorial had been lobbied for since 1907: The New York Times wrote, "People are beginning to ask whether this ignoring of Byron is not a thing of which England should be ashamed ... a bust or a tablet might be put in the Poets' Corner and England be relieved of ingratitude toward one of her really great sons."[95]
+Robert Ripley had drawn a picture of Boatswain's grave with the caption "Lord Byron's dog has a magnificent tomb while Lord Byron himself has none". This came as a shock to the English, particularly schoolchildren, who, Ripley said, raised funds of their own accord to provide the poet with a suitable memorial.[96]
+Close to the centre of Athens, Greece, outside the National Garden, is a statue depicting Greece in the form of a woman crowning Byron. The statue is by the French sculptors Henri-Michel Chapu and Alexandre Falguière. Since 2008, the anniversary of Byron's death, 19 April, has been honoured in Greece as "Byron Day".[97]
+Upon his death, the barony passed to Byron's cousin George Anson Byron, a career naval officer.
+Lady Caroline Lamb
+Jane Elizabeth Scott "Lady Oxford"
+Augusta Leigh
+Anne Isabella Milbanke in 1812 by Charles Hayter
+Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli
+Byron described his first intense feelings at age eight for his distant cousin, Mary Duff:
+My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour, and at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, 'O Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, and your old sweetheart, Mary Duff, is married to Mr. C***.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment, but they nearly threw me into convulsions... How the deuce did all this occur so early? Where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder-stroke – it nearly choked me – to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of every body. And it is a phenomenon in my existence (for I was not eight years old) which has puzzled, and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it; and lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever...But, the more I reflect, the more I am bewildered to assign any cause for this precocity of affection.[98]
+Byron also became attached to Margaret Parker, another distant cousin.[35] While his recollection of his love for Mary Duff is that he was ignorant of adult sexuality during this time and was bewildered as to the source of the intensity of his feelings, he would later confess that:
+My passions were developed very early – so early, that few would believe me – if I were to state the period – and the facts which accompanied it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons that caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts – having anticipated life.[99]
+This is the only reference Byron himself makes to the event, and he is ambiguous as to how old he was when it occurred. After his death, his lawyer wrote to a mutual friend telling him a "singular fact" about Byron's life which was "scarcely fit for narration". But he disclosed it nonetheless, thinking it might explain Byron's sexual "propensities":
+When nine years old at his mother's house a Free Scotch girl [May, sometimes called Mary, Gray, one of his first caretakers] used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.[100]
+Gray later used this knowledge as a means of ensuring his silence if he were to be tempted to disclose the "low company" she kept during drinking binges.[101] She was later dismissed, supposedly for beating Byron when he was 11.[35]
+A few years later, while he was still a child, Lord Grey De Ruthyn (unrelated to May Gray), a suitor of his mother's, also made sexual advances on him.[102] Byron's personality has been characterised as exceptionally proud and sensitive, especially when it came to his deformity.[15] His extreme reaction to seeing his mother flirting outrageously with Lord Grey De Ruthyn after the incident suggests this: he did not tell her of Grey's conduct toward him; he simply refused to speak to him again and ignored his mother's commands to be reconciled.[102] Leslie A. Marchand, one of Byron's biographers, theorises that Lord Grey De Ruthyn's advances prompted Byron's later sexual liaisons with young men at Harrow and Cambridge.[39][failed verification]
+Scholars acknowledge a more or less important bisexual component in Byron's very complex sentimental and sexual life. Bernhard Jackson asserts that "Byron's sexual orientation has long been a difficult, not to say contentious, topic, and anyone who seeks to discuss it must to some degree speculate, since the evidence is nebulous, contradictory and scanty... it is not so simple to define Byron as homosexual or heterosexual: he seems rather to have been both, and either."[103][104] Crompton states: "What was not understood in Byron's own century (except by a tiny circle of his associates) was that Byron was bisexual".[105] Another biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, has posited that Byron's true sexual yearnings were for adolescent males.[39] Byron used a code by which he communicated his homosexual Greek adventures to John Hobhouse in England: Bernhard Jackson recalls that "Byron's early code for sex with a boy" was "Plen(um). and optabil(em). -Coit(um)"[103] Bullough summarizes:
+Byron, was attached to Nicolo Giraud, a young French-Greek lad who had been a model for the painter Lusieri before Byron found him. Byron left him 7,000 pounds in his will. When Byron returned to Italy, he became involved with a number of boys in Venice but eventually settled on Loukas Chalandritsanos, age 15, who was with him when he was killed  [sic][106] (Crompton, 1985).
+In 1812, Byron embarked on a well-publicised affair with the married Lady Caroline Lamb that shocked the British public.[107] She had spurned the attention of the poet on their first meeting, subsequently giving Byron what became his lasting epitaph when she famously described him as "mad, bad and dangerous to know".[108] This did not prevent her from pursuing him.[109][110]
+Byron eventually broke off the relationship and moved swiftly on to others (such as that with Lady Oxford), but Lamb never entirely recovered, pursuing him even after he tired of her. She was emotionally disturbed and lost so much weight that Byron sarcastically commented to her mother-in-law, his friend Lady Melbourne, that he was "haunted by a skeleton".[111]
+She began to call on him at home, sometimes dressed in disguise as a pageboy,[107] at a time when such an act could ruin both of them socially. Once, during such a visit, she wrote on a book at his desk, "Remember me!" As a retort, Byron wrote a poem entitled Remember Thee! Remember Thee! which concludes with the line "Thou false to him, thou fiend to me".
+As a child, Byron had seen little of his half-sister Augusta Leigh; in adulthood, he formed a close relationship with her that has been interpreted by some as incestuous,[111] and by others as innocent.[35] Augusta (who was married) gave birth on 15 April 1814 to her third daughter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, rumoured by some to be Byron's.
+Eventually Byron began to court Lady Caroline's cousin Anne Isabella Milbanke ("Annabella"), who refused his first proposal of marriage but later accepted him. Milbanke was a highly moral woman, intelligent and mathematically gifted; she was also an heiress. They married at Seaham Hall, County Durham, on 2 January 1815.[111]
+The marriage proved unhappy. They had a daughter, Augusta Ada. On 16 January 1816, Lady Byron left him, taking Ada with her. That same year (21 April), Byron signed the Deed of Separation. Rumours of marital violence, adultery with actresses, incest with Augusta Leigh, and sodomy were circulated, assisted by a jealous Lady Caroline.[111] In a letter, Augusta quoted him as saying: "Even to have such a thing said is utter destruction and ruin to a man from which he can never recover." That same year Lady Caroline published her popular novel Glenarvon, in which Lord Byron was portrayed as the seedy title character.[112]
+Elizabeth Medora Leigh (1814–1849)
+Ada Lovelace(1815–1852)
+Clara Allegra Byron (1817–1822)
+Byron wrote a letter to John Hanson from Newstead Abbey, dated 17 January 1809, that includes "You will discharge my Cook, & Laundry Maid, the other two I shall retain to take care of the house, more especially as the youngest is pregnant (I need not tell you by whom) and I cannot have the girl on the parish."[113] His reference to "The youngest" is understood to have been to a maid, Lucy, and the parenthesised remark to indicate himself as siring a son born that year. In 2010 part of a baptismal record was uncovered which apparently said: "September 24 George illegitimate son of Lucy Monk, illegitimate son of Baron Byron, of Newstead, Nottingham, Newstead Abbey."[114]
+Augusta Leigh's child, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, born 1814, was very likely fathered by Byron, who was Augusta's half-brother.
+Byron had a child, The Hon. Augusta Ada Byron ("Ada", later Countess of Lovelace), in 1815, by his wife Annabella Byron, Lady Byron (née Anne Isabella Milbanke, or "Annabella"), later Lady Wentworth. Ada Lovelace, notable in her own right, collaborated with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine, a predecessor to modern computers. She is recognised[115] as one of[116] the world's first computer programmers.
+He also had an extramarital child in 1817, Clara Allegra Byron, with Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley and stepdaughter of William Godwin, writer of Political Justice and Caleb Williams. Allegra is not entitled to the style "The Hon." as is usually given to the daughter of barons, since she was born outside of his marriage. Born in Bath in 1817, Allegra lived with Byron for a few months in Venice; he refused to allow an Englishwoman caring for the girl to adopt her and objected to her being raised in the Shelleys' household.[58] He wished for her to be brought up Catholic and not marry an Englishman,[58] and he made arrangements for her to inherit 5,000 lira upon marriage or when she reached the age of 21, provided she did not marry a native of Britain.[58] However, the girl died aged five of a fever in Bagnacavallo, Italy, while Byron was in Pisa; he was deeply upset by the news.[58] He had Allegra's body sent back to England to be buried at his old school, Harrow, because Protestants could not be buried in consecrated ground in Catholic countries.[58] At one time he himself had wanted to be buried at Harrow. Byron was indifferent towards Allegra's mother, Claire Clairmont.[58]
+Byron enjoyed adventure, especially relating to the sea.[18]
+The first recorded notable example of open water swimming took place on 3 May 1810 when Lord Byron swam from Europe to Asia across the Hellespont Strait.[117] This is often seen as the birth of the sport and pastime, and to commemorate it, the event is recreated every year as an open water swimming event.[118]
+Whilst sailing from Genoa to Cephalonia in 1823, every day at noon, Byron and Trelawny, in calm weather, jumped overboard for a swim without fear of sharks, which were not unknown in those waters. Once, according to Trelawny, they let the geese and ducks loose and followed them and the dogs into the water, each with an arm in the ship Captain’s new scarlet waistcoat, to the annoyance of the Captain and the amusement of the crew.[119]
+Byron had a great love of animals, most notably for a Newfoundland dog named Boatswain. When the animal contracted rabies, Byron nursed him, albeit unsuccessfully, without any thought or fear of becoming bitten and infected.[120][121]
+Although deep in debt at the time, Byron commissioned an impressive marble funerary monument for Boatswain at Newstead Abbey, larger than his own, and the only building work which he ever carried out on his estate. In his 1811 will, Byron requested that he be buried with him.[58] The 26‐line poem "Epitaph to a Dog" has become one of his best-known works, but a draft of an 1830 letter by Hobhouse shows him to be the author, and that Byron decided to use Hobhouse's lengthy epitaph instead of his own, which read: "To mark a friend's remains these stones arise/I never knew but one – and here he lies."[122]
+Byron also kept a tame bear while he was a student at Trinity, out of resentment for rules forbidding pet dogs like his beloved Boatswain. There being no mention of bears in their statutes, the college authorities had no legal basis for complaining: Byron even suggested that he would apply for a college fellowship for the bear.[123]
+During his lifetime, in addition to numerous cats, dogs, and horses, Byron kept a fox, monkeys, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, an Egyptian crane, a badger, geese, a heron, and a goat.[124] Except for the horses, they all resided indoors at his homes in England, Switzerland, Italy, and Greece.[citation needed]
+I am such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me.[125]
+As a boy, Byron's character is described as a "mixture of affectionate sweetness and playfulness, by which it was impossible not to be attached", although he also exhibited "silent rages, moody sullenness and revenge" with a precocious bent for attachment and obsession.[98]
+From birth, Byron suffered from a deformity of his right foot. Although it has generally been referred to as a "club foot", some modern medical authors maintain that it was a consequence of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis), and others that it was a dysplasia, a failure of the bones to form properly.[126] Whatever the cause, he was afflicted with a limp that caused him lifelong psychological and physical misery, aggravated by painful and pointless "medical treatment" in his childhood and the nagging suspicion that with proper care it might have been cured.[127]
+He was extremely self-conscious about this from a young age, nicknaming himself le diable boîteux[128] (French for "the limping devil", after the nickname given to Asmodeus by Alain-René Lesage in his 1707 novel of the same name). Although he often wore specially-made shoes in an attempt to hide the deformed foot,[39] he refused to wear any type of brace that might improve the limp.[18]
+Scottish novelist John Galt felt his oversensitivity to the "innocent fault in his foot was unmanly and excessive" because the limp was "not greatly conspicuous". He first met Byron on a voyage to Sardinia and did not realise he had any deficiency for several days, and still could not tell at first if the lameness was a temporary injury or not. At the time Galt met him he was an adult and had worked to develop "a mode of walking across a room by which it was scarcely at all perceptible".[20] The motion of the ship at sea may also have helped to create a favourable first impression and hide any deficiencies in his gait, but Galt's biography is also described as being "rather well-meant than well-written", so Galt may be guilty of minimising a defect that was actually still noticeable.[129]
+Byron's adult height was 5 feet 8.5 inches (1.74 m), his weight fluctuating between 9.5 stone (133 lb; 60 kg) and 14 stone (200 lb; 89 kg). He was renowned for his personal beauty, which he enhanced by wearing curl-papers in his hair at night.[130] He was athletic, being a competent boxer and horse-rider and an excellent swimmer. He attended pugilistic tuition at the Bond Street rooms of former prizefighting champion ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson, whom Byron called ‘the Emperor of Pugilism’, and recorded these sparring sessions in his letters and journals.[131]
+Byron and other writers, such as his friend Hobhouse, described his eating habits in detail. At the time he entered Cambridge, he went on a strict diet to control his weight. He also exercised a great deal, and at that time wore a great amount of clothes to cause himself to perspire. For most of his life he was a vegetarian and often lived for days on dry biscuits and white wine. Occasionally he would eat large helpings of meat and desserts, after which he would purge himself. Although he is described by Galt and others as having a predilection for "violent" exercise, Hobhouse suggests that the pain in his deformed foot made physical activity difficult and that his weight problem was the result.[130]
+Byron first took his seat in the House of Lords 13 March 1809[132] but left London on 11 June 1809 for the Continent.[133] Byron's association with the Holland House Whigs provided him with a discourse of liberty rooted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.[134] A strong advocate of social reform, he received particular praise as one of the few Parliamentary defenders of the Luddites: specifically, he was against a death penalty for Luddite "frame breakers" in Nottinghamshire, who destroyed textile machines that were putting them out of work. His first speech before the Lords, on 27 February 1812, was loaded with sarcastic references to the "benefits" of automation, which he saw as producing inferior material as well as putting people out of work, and concluded the proposed law was only missing two things to be effective: "Twelve Butchers for a Jury and a Jeffries for a Judge!". Byron's speech was officially recorded and printed in Hansard.[135] He said later that he "spoke very violent sentences with a sort of modest impudence" and thought he came across as "a bit theatrical".[136] The full text of the speech, which he had previously written out, was presented to Dallas in manuscript form and he quotes it in his work.[137]
+Two months later, in conjunction with the other Whigs, Byron made another impassioned speech before the House of Lords in support of Catholic emancipation.[134][138] Byron expressed opposition to the established religion because it was unfair to people of other faiths.[139]
+These experiences inspired Byron to write political poems such as Song for the Luddites (1816) and The Landlords' Interest, Canto XIV of The Age of Bronze.[140]
+Examples of poems in which he attacked his political opponents include Wellington: The Best of the Cut-Throats (1819) and The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh (1818).[141]
+Byron wrote prolifically.[142] In 1832 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 14 duodecimo volumes, including a life[136] by Thomas Moore. Subsequent editions were released in 17 volumes, first published a year later, in 1833.
+Byron's magnum opus, Don Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton's Paradise Lost.[143] The poem, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels – social, political, literary and ideological. In addition to its biting satire, the poem (especially in the early cantos) is funny.[144]
+Byron published the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes with his regular publisher over the shocking nature of the poetry. By this time, he had been a famous poet for seven years, and when he self-published the beginning cantos, they were well received in some quarters.[40] It was then released volume by volume through his regular publishing house.[40] By 1822, cautious acceptance by the public had turned to outrage, and Byron's publisher refused to continue to publish the works.[40] In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron expresses his detestation for poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[40][145] In letters to Francis Hodgson, Byron referred to Wordsworth as "Turdsworth".[146]
+Byron wrote Irish Avatar in connection with the trip of the King of the United Kingdom George IV to Ireland. Byron's official interpretation of this fact is contrasted with the indignation of British tyranny imbued with angry copyright. Byron's satire is directed against both despotism and lackey. In his satire, the poet is indignant at the anguish of those who crawled before George, as before the new "god". The author reminds the Irish that in the person of George IV they should see the British government, which took away all their freedoms. The lyrical hero calls on the Irish to fight against British tyranny and speaks of their love for those Irish who are fighting for the freedom of their country.
+Byron was a bitter opponent of Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece and "reacted with fury" when Elgin's agent gave him a tour of the Parthenon, during which he saw the spaces left by the missing friezes and metopes. He denounced Elgin's actions in his poem The Curse of Minerva and in Canto II (stanzas XI–XV) of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.[147]
+Byron is considered to be the first modern-style celebrity. His image as the personification of the Byronic hero fascinated the public,[39] and his wife Annabella coined the term "Byromania" to refer to the commotion surrounding him.[39] His self-awareness and personal promotion are seen as a beginning to what would become the modern rock star; he would instruct artists painting portraits of him not to paint him with pen or book in hand, but as a "man of action."[39] While Byron first welcomed fame, he later turned from it by going into voluntary exile from Britain.[28]
+Biographies were distorted by the burning of Byron's memoir in the offices of his publisher, John Murray, a month after his death and the suppression of details of Byron's bisexuality by subsequent heads of the firm (which held the richest Byron archive). As late as the 1950s, scholar Leslie Marchard was expressly forbidden by the Murray company to reveal details of Byron's same-sex passions.[148]
+The re-founding of the Byron Society in 1971 reflected the fascination that many people had with Byron and his work.[149] This society became very active, publishing an annual journal. Thirty-six Byron Societies function throughout the world, and an International Conference takes place annually.
+Byron exercised a marked influence on Continental literature and art, and his reputation as a poet is higher in many European countries than in Britain or America, although not as high as in his time, when he was widely thought to be the greatest poet in the world.[28] Byron's writings also inspired many composers. Over forty operas have been based on his works, in addition to three operas about Byron himself (including Virgil Thomson's Lord Byron). His poetry was set to music by many Romantic composers, including Beethoven, Schubert, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Carl Loewe. Among his greatest admirers was Hector Berlioz, whose operas and Mémoires reveal Byron's influence.[150]
+The figure of the Byronic hero pervades much of his work, and Byron himself is considered to epitomise many of the characteristics of this literary figure.[39] The use of a Byronic hero by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence during the 19th century and beyond, including the Brontë sisters.[39][151] His philosophy was more durably influential in continental Europe than in England; Friedrich Nietzsche admired him, and the Byronic hero was echoed in Nietzsche's superman.[152]
+The Byronic hero presents an idealised, but flawed character whose attributes include: great talent; great passion; a distaste for society and social institutions; a lack of respect for rank and privilege (although possessing both); being thwarted in love by social constraint or death; rebellion; exile; an unsavory secret past; arrogance; overconfidence or lack of foresight; and, ultimately, a self-destructive manner. These types of characters have since become ubiquitous in literature and politics.
+This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.

en/2174.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,105 @@

+George Timothy Clooney (born May 6, 1961) is an American actor, film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is the recipient of three Golden Globe Awards and two Academy Awards, one for acting in Syriana (2006) and the other for co-producing Argo (2012). In 2018, he was the recipient of the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award.[2]
+Clooney made his acting debut on television in 1978, and later gained wide recognition in his role as Dr. Doug Ross on the medical drama ER from 1994 to 1999, for which he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. While working on ER, he began attracting a variety of leading roles in films, with his breakthrough role in From Dusk till Dawn (1996),[3][4] and the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), in which he first worked with director Steven Soderbergh, who would become a long-time collaborator. In 1999, he took the lead role in Three Kings, a well-received war satire set during the Gulf War.
+In 2001, Clooney's fame widened with the release of his biggest commercial success, the heist comedy remake Ocean's Eleven, the first of what became a trilogy, starring Clooney. He made his directorial debut a year later with the biographical spy comedy Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and has since directed the historical drama Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), the sports comedy Leatherheads (2008), the political drama The Ides of March (2011), and the war film The Monuments Men (2014). Clooney won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the Middle East thriller Syriana (2005), and subsequently earned Best Actor nominations for the legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007) and the comedy-dramas Up in the Air (2009) and The Descendants (2011). In 2013, he received the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing the political thriller Argo. He has been nominated for Oscars in six different categories, a record he shares with Walt Disney.[5][6]
+In 2009, Clooney was included in Time's annual Time 100 as one of the "Most Influential People in the World".[7] He is also noted for his political and economic activism, and has served as one of the United Nations Messengers of Peace since January 31, 2008.[8][9][10] Clooney is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[11] He is married to human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
+Clooney was born on May 6, 1961 in Lexington, Kentucky.[12][13] His mother, Nina Bruce (née Warren),[14] was a beauty queen and city councilwoman. His father, Nick Clooney, is a former anchorman and television host, including five years on the AMC network.[15] Clooney is of Irish, German, and English ancestry.[16] His maternal great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Sparrow, was the half-sister of Nancy Lincoln, mother of President Abraham Lincoln.[17][18][19] Clooney has an older sister named Adelia (known as Ada).[20] Cabaret singer and actress Rosemary Clooney was an aunt.[12] Through Rosemary, his cousins include actors Miguel Ferrer, Rafael Ferrer, and Gabriel Ferrer, who is married to singer Debby Boone.[21]
+Clooney was raised a strict Roman Catholic[22] but said in 2006 that he did not know if he believed "in Heaven, or even God."[23] He has said, "Yes, we were Catholic, big-time, whole family, whole group."[24] He began his education at the Blessed Sacrament School in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. He attended St. Michael's School in Worthington, Ohio; then Western Row Elementary School (a public school) in Mason, Ohio, from 1968 to 1974; and St. Susanna School in Mason, where he served as an altar boy. The Clooneys moved back to Kentucky when George was midway through the seventh grade.[25] In middle school, Clooney developed Bell's palsy, a medical condition that partially paralyzes the face. The malady went away within a year. In an interview with Larry King, he stated that "yes, it goes away. It takes about nine months to go away. It was the first year of high school, which was a bad time for having half your face paralyzed."[24] He also described one positive outcome of the condition: "It's probably a great thing that it happened to me because it forced me to engage in a series of making fun of myself. And I think that's an important part of being famous. The practical jokes have to be aimed at you."[26]
+After his parents moved to Augusta, Kentucky, Clooney attended Augusta High School. He has stated that he earned all As and a B in school,[12] and played baseball and basketball. He tried out to play professional baseball with the Cincinnati Reds in 1977, but he did not pass the first round of player cuts and was not offered a contract.[27] He attended Northern Kentucky University from 1979 to 1981, majoring in broadcast journalism, and very briefly attended the University of Cincinnati, but did not graduate from either.[28] He earned money selling women's shoes, insurance door-to-door, stocking shelves, working in construction, and cutting tobacco.[23][29]
+Clooney's first role was as an extra in the television mini-series Centennial in 1978, which was based on the novel of the same name by James A. Michener and was partly filmed in Clooney's hometown of Augusta, Kentucky.[30][31] Clooney's first major role came in 1984 in the short-lived sitcom E/R (not to be confused with ER, the better-known hospital drama, on which Clooney also co-starred a decade later). He played a handyman on the series The Facts of Life and appeared as Bobby Hopkins, a detective, on an episode of The Golden Girls. His first prominent role was a semi-regular supporting role in the sitcom Roseanne, playing Roseanne Barr's supervisor Booker Brooks, followed by the role of a construction worker on Baby Talk, a co-starring role on the CBS drama Bodies of Evidence as Detective Ryan Walker, and then a year-long turn as Det. James Falconer on Sisters. In 1988, Clooney played in the comedy-horror film Return of the Killer Tomatoes.[32] In 1990, he starred in the short-lived ABC police drama Sunset Beat.[33] During this period, Clooney was a student at the Beverly Hills Playhouse acting school for five years.[34]
+Clooney rose to fame when he played Dr. Doug Ross, alongside Anthony Edwards, Julianna Margulies, and Noah Wyle, on the hit NBC medical drama ER from 1994 to 1999. After leaving the series in 1999, he made a cameo appearance in the 6th season and returned for a guest spot in the show's final season.[35] For his work on the series, Clooney received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 1995 and 1996.[36][37] He also earned three Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actor – Television Series Drama in 1995, 1996, and 1997 (losing to co-star Anthony Edwards).[38][39]
+Clooney began appearing in films while working on ER. His first major Hollywood role was in the horror comedy-crime thriller From Dusk till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez and co-starring Harvey Keitel. He followed its success with the romantic comedy One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer, and the action-thriller The Peacemaker with Nicole Kidman. Clooney was then cast as Batman in Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin, which was a modest box office performer, but a critical failure (with Clooney himself calling the film "a waste of money").[40] In 1998, he co-starred in the crime-comedy Out of Sight opposite Jennifer Lopez, marking the first of his many collaborations with director Steven Soderbergh.[41] He also starred in Three Kings during the last weeks of his contract with ER.[42]
+After leaving ER, Clooney starred in the commercially successful films The Perfect Storm (2000), a disaster drama; and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a Coen brothers adventure comedy. In 2001, he teamed up with Soderbergh again for the heist comedy Ocean's Eleven, a remake of the 1960s Rat Pack film of the same name, with Clooney playing Danny Ocean, originally portrayed by Frank Sinatra. It is Clooney's most successful film with him in the lead role, earning $451 million worldwide (he appeared, but did not star, in Gravity, which has a $723 million worldwide box office).[44][45] Ocean's Eleven inspired two sequels starring Clooney, Ocean's Twelve in 2004[46] and Ocean's Thirteen in 2007.[47]
+In 2001, Clooney and Soderbergh co-founded Section Eight Productions, for which Grant Heslov was president of television. Clooney made his directorial debut in the 2002 film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on the autobiography of TV producer Chuck Barris. Though the film did not do well at the box office, critics stated that Clooney's directing showed promise.[48]
+In 2005, Clooney starred in Syriana, which was based loosely on former Central Intelligence Agency agent Robert Baer's memoirs of his service in the Middle East. Clooney suffered an accident on the set of Syriana, which caused a brain injury with complications from a punctured dura.[49] The same year he directed, produced, and starred in Good Night, and Good Luck, a film about 1950s television journalist Edward R. Murrow's famous war of words with Senator Joseph McCarthy. At the 2006 Academy Awards, Clooney was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck, as well as Best Supporting Actor for Syriana. He won the Oscar for his role in Syriana.[50]
+Clooney next appeared in The Good German (2006), a film noir directed by Soderbergh that is set in post-World War II Germany. In August 2006, Clooney and Heslov started the production company Smokehouse Pictures. In October 2006, Clooney received the American Cinematheque Award, which honors someone in the entertainment industry who has made "a significant contribution to the art of motion pictures".[51] On January 22, 2008, Clooney was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for Michael Clayton (2007) but did not win. Later that year, he directed his third film, Leatherheads, in which he also starred. On April 4, 2008, Variety reported that Clooney had quietly resigned from the Writers Guild of America over a dispute concerning Leatherheads. Clooney, who is the director, producer, and star of the film, claimed that he had contributed in writing "all but two scenes" of it, and requested a writing credit alongside Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, who had worked on the screenplay for 17 years. Clooney lost an arbitration vote 2–1, and withdrew from the union over the decision. He became a "financial core status" non-member, meaning he no longer has voting rights, and cannot run for office or attend membership meetings, according to the WGA's constitution.[52]
+He next co-starred with Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey in the war comedy film The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was directed by Heslov and released in November 2009. Also in November 2009, he voiced the title character in Wes Anderson's animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox. The same year, Clooney starred in the comedy-drama Up in the Air, which was initially given limited release, and then wide-released on December 25, 2009. For his performance in the film, which was directed by Jason Reitman, he was nominated for a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA, and an Academy Award.[53] 2010 saw the release of The American, based on the novel A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth and directed by Anton Corbijn. Clooney played the lead role, and was a producer of the film.[54]
+As of 2011[update], Clooney is represented by Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency (CAA).[55] In 2011 Clooney starred in The Descendants as a husband whose wife has an accident that leaves her in a coma. He earned critical praise for his work, and won the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. Also, he was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild for Best Actor, the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, and the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the political drama The Ides of March.
+In 2013, Clooney won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, the BAFTA Award for Best Picture and the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing Argo. He is the only person in Academy Award history to be nominated for Oscars in six different categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay.[56]
+Clooney co-starred with Sandra Bullock in Gravity (2013), a space thriller directed by Alfonso Cuarón.[57] He co-wrote, directed and starred in The Monuments Men, an adaption of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel.[58] Clooney also produced August: Osage County (2013), an adaptation of the play of the same name. The film stars Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.[59] His next film was Tomorrowland (2015), a science fiction adventure film in which he played Frank Walker, an inventor.[60] Later in the year, he was featured as himself in the Netflix Christmas musical comedy A Very Murray Christmas, starring Bill Murray.[61]
+Hail, Caesar!, a comedy from the Coen brothers set in the Hollywood film industry in the 1950s, premiered in February 2016. Clooney portrayed Baird Whitlock, a Robert Taylor-type film star who is kidnapped during the production of a film. Josh Brolin co-starred as fixer Eddie Mannix.[62] Clooney reunited with Julia Roberts for the Jodie Foster-directed thriller Money Monster (2016), playing the host of a television show that investigates conspiracies on commerce and Wall Street, who is taken hostage by a bankrupt viewer given a bad tip.[63]
+In 2013, Clooney co-founded Casamigos Tequila with Rande Gerber and Michael Meldman.[64] It was sold to Diageo for $700 million in June 2017, with an additional $300 million possible depending on the company's performance over the next ten years.[65] According to Forbes annual ranking, he was the world's highest-paid actor for 2017-2018, earning $239 million between June 1, 2017 and June 1, 2018.[66]
+In October 2017 his directorial project Suburbicon a 1950s-set crime comedy was released. It stars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, and Oscar Isaac, from a script written by the Coen brothers in the 1980s, that they had originally intended to direct themselves.[67]
+He received the 2018 AFI Life Achievement Award on June 7, 2018.[68]
+In 2019, Clooney starred, directed, and produced the Hulu miniseries Catch-22 based upon the novel of the same name by Joseph Heller.[69] Clooney initially was cast in a main role in the series, however, opted to take a smaller supporting role instead.[70] The series premiered on May 31, 2019, to critical acclaim.[71]
+Clooney will next direct, star, and produce the science fiction film The Midnight Sky, based upon the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton for Netflix.[72] He is also attached to re-unite with Steven Soderbergh on Kill Switch.[73]
+Clooney is a supporter of gay rights.[74] He supported both of Barack Obama's 2008[75] and 2012 presidential campaigns.[76] Clooney endorsed Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential election.[77]
+Clooney is involved with Not On Our Watch Project, an organization that focuses global attention and resources to stop and prevent mass atrocities, along with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, David Pressman, and Jerry Weintraub.[78] In February 2009, he visited Goz Beida, Chad, with New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.[79] In January 2010, he organized the telethon Hope for Haiti Now,[80] which collected donations for the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims.[81]
+In March 2012, Clooney starred with Martin Sheen and Brad Pitt 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 David Boies.[82] The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.[83][84] In September 2012, Clooney offered to take an auction winner out to lunch to benefit the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN works to create a safe space in schools for children who are or may be perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.[85]
+Clooney has advocated a resolution of the Darfur conflict.[86] He spoke at a 2006 Save Darfur rally in Washington, D.C. In April 2006, he spent ten days in Chad and Sudan with his father to make the TV special "A Journey to Darfur" reflecting the situation of Darfur's refugees, and advocated for action. The documentary was broadcast on American cable TV as well as in the UK and France. In 2008, it was released on DVD with the sale proceeds being donated to the International Rescue Committee.[87][88][89][90] In September of the same year, he spoke to the UN Security Council with Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel to ask the UN to find a solution to the conflict and to help the people of Darfur.[91] In December, he visited China and Egypt with Don Cheadle and two Olympic winners to ask both governments to pressure Sudan's government.[92]
+On March 25, 2007, he sent an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, calling on the European Union to take "decisive action" in the region given the failure of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir to respond to UN resolutions.[93] He narrated and was co-executive producer of the 2007 documentary Sand and Sorrow.[94] Clooney also appeared in the documentary film Darfur Now, a call-to-action film released in November 2007 for people all over the world to help stop the Darfur crisis.[95] In December 2007, Clooney and fellow actor Don Cheadle received the Summit Peace Award from the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in Rome. In his acceptance speech, Clooney said that "Don and I ... stand here before you as failures. The simple truth is that when it comes to the atrocities in Darfur ... those people are not better off now than they were years ago."[96] On January 18, 2008, the United Nations announced Clooney's appointment as a UN messenger of peace, effective January 31.[8][9]
+Clooney conceived of and, with John Prendergast – human rights activist, co-founder of the Enough Project, and Strategic Advisor for Not on Our Watch Project – initiated the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), after an October 2010 trip to South Sudan. SSP aims to monitor armed activity for signs of renewed civil war between Sudan and South Sudan, and to detect and deter mass atrocities along the border regions there.[97]
+Clooney and John Prendergast co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece in May 2011, titled "Dancing with a dictator in Sudan", arguing that:
+President Omar al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, is escalating bombing and food aid obstruction in Darfur, and he now threatens the entire north-south peace process ... the evidence shows that incentives alone are insufficient to change Khartoum's calculations. International support should be sought immediately for denying debt relief, expanding the ICC indictments, diplomatically isolating the regime, suspending all non-humanitarian aid, obstructing state-controlled bank transactions and freezing accounts holding oil wealth diverted by senior regime officials.[98]
+On March 16, 2012, Clooney was arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy for civil disobedience.[99][100] He intended to be arrested when he planned the protest.[100] Several other prominent participants were also arrested, including Martin Luther King III.[100] Clooney has been described as one of the most strident critics of Omar al-Bashir.[101]
+Clooney supports the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. He is one of the chief associates of the 100 Lives Initiative, a project which aims to remember the lives lost during the event.[102] As part of the initiative, Clooney launched the Aurora Prize, which awards to those who risk their lives to prevent genocides and atrocities.[102][103] Clooney had also urged various American government officials to support the United States' recognition of the Armenian Genocide.[103] Clooney visited Armenia to commemorate the 101st anniversary of the event in April 2016.[104]
+In May 2015, Clooney told the BBC that the Syrian conflict was too complicated politically to get involved in and he wanted to focus on helping the refugees.[105] In March 2016, he and his wife, Amal Clooney, met with Syrian refugees living in Berlin to mark the fifth anniversary of the conflict, before meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to thank her for Germany's open-door policy.[106]
+In 2018, following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, the Clooneys pledged $500,000 to the March for Our Lives and said they would be in attendance.[107]
+On March 28, 2019, Clooney wrote an open letter calling for the boycott of the Sultan of Brunei's hotels over a new law that came into force on April 3, 2019 that punishes homosexual sex and adultery with death by stoning. Clooney lists 9 hotels including The Dorchester, 45 Park Lane, Coworth Park, The Beverly Hills Hotel, Hotel Bel-Air, Le Meurice, Hotel Plaza Athenee, Hotel Eden and Hotel Principe di Savoia and asks readers to consider how "we are putting money directly into the pockets of men who choose to stone and whip to death their own citizens for being gay or accused of adultery."[108][109]
+Clooney dated actress Kelly Preston (1987–1989). During this relationship, he purchased a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Max as a gift for Preston, but when their relationship ended, Clooney kept the pig for an additional 18 years until Max died in 2006. He has jokingly referred to Max as the longest relationship he had ever had.[110]
+Clooney was married to actress Talia Balsam from 1989 to 1993.[111] He also had a relationship with actress Ginger Lynn Allen.  Clooney dated French reality TV personality Céline Balitran (1996–1999).[112] After meeting British model Lisa Snowdon in 2000, he had a five-year on-again, off-again relationship with her.[113]
+Clooney dated Renée Zellweger (2001) and Krista Allen (2002–2008).[114] In June 2007, he started dating reality personality Sarah Larson, but the couple broke up in May 2008.[115] In July 2009, Clooney was in a relationship with Italian actress Elisabetta Canalis until they split in June 2011.[116][117] In July 2011, Clooney started dating former WWE personnel Stacy Keibler,[118] and they ended their relationship in July 2013.[119]
+Clooney became engaged to British-Lebanese human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin on April 28, 2014.[120][121] In July 2014, Clooney publicly mocked the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail after it claimed his fiancée's mother opposes their marriage on religious grounds.[122] When the tabloid apologized for its false story, Clooney refused to accept the apology. He called the paper "the worst kind of tabloid. One that makes up its facts to the detriment of its readers."[123] On August 7, 2014, Clooney and Alamuddin obtained marriage licenses at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea of the United Kingdom.[124] Alamuddin and Clooney were officially married on September 27, 2014, at Ca' Farsetti.[125] They were married by Clooney's friend Walter Veltroni, the former mayor of Rome.[126]
+In 2015, Clooney and Alamuddin adopted a rescue dog, a bassett hound named Millie, from the San Gabriel Valley Humane Society.[127]
+On February 9, 2017, it was reported by the CBS talk show, The Talk, that Amal was pregnant, and that they were expecting twins.[128] On June 6, 2017, Amal gave birth to a daughter, Ella, and a son, Alexander.[129]
+Clooney was raised in a devout Catholic family stating that he went to confession every week. Now, Clooney holds agnostic beliefs, saying he doesn't know if he believes in God. He doesn't believe there is a Heaven and Hell.[130]
+Clooney has property in Los Angeles. He purchased the 7,354-square-foot (683.2 m2) house in 1995 through his George Guilfoyle Trust. His home in Italy is in the village of Laglio, on Lake Como,[131] near the former residence of Italian author Ada Negri.[132] Clooney also owns a home in Los Cabos, Mexico, that is next door to the home of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber.[133] In 2014, Clooney and his new British wife Amal Alamuddin bought the Grade II listed[134] Mill House on an island in the River Thames at Sonning Eye in Oxfordshire, England[135] at a cost of around £10 million.[136]
+On September 21, 2007, Clooney and then-girlfriend Sarah Larson were injured in a motorcycle accident in Weehawken, New Jersey, when his motorcycle was hit by a car. The driver of the car reported that Clooney attempted to pass him on the right,[137] while Clooney said that the driver signaled left and then decided to make an abrupt right turn and clipped his motorcycle. On October 9, 2007, more than two dozen staff at Palisades Medical Center were suspended without pay for looking at Clooney's medical records in violation of federal law.[138]
+On July 10, 2018, Clooney was hit by a car while riding a motorcycle to a film set in Sardinia. He was hospitalized with minor injuries.[139][140]
+Growing up around Cincinnati, Clooney is a fan of the Cincinnati Bengals and Cincinnati Reds.[141] He tried out to be a Red in 1977.[142]
+Clooney has appeared in commercials outside the U.S. for Fiat, Nespresso, Martini vermouth, and Omega.[143][144][145][146] Clooney was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007, 2008, and 2009.[147][148][149] He is sometimes described as one of the most handsome men in the world.[150][151] In 2005, TV Guide ranked Clooney No. 1 on its "50 Sexiest Stars of All Time" list.[152] The cover story in a February 2008 issue of Time magazine was headlined with: "George Clooney: The last movie star".[153]
+He was parodied in the South Park episode "Smug Alert!", which criticizes his acceptance speech at the 78th Academy Awards.[citation needed] Clooney has also lent his voice to South Park as Sparky the Dog in "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" and as the emergency room doctor in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Clooney was caricatured in the American Dad! episode "Tears of a Clooney", in which Francine Smith plans to destroy him.[154]
+Director Alexander Cartio made his debut feature film, Convincing Clooney, about a Los Angeles artist who, faced with rejection as an actor and screenwriter, concocts a master plan to get Clooney to star in his first-ever low-budget short film. The movie was released on DVD in November 2011.[155]
+Articles
+Throughout his career, Clooney has won two Academy Awards, one for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Syriana[156] and one for Best Picture as one of the producers for Argo, as well as a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. For his role in The Descendants, he won a Golden Globe Award[157] and was nominated for an Academy Award, BAFTA Award, Satellite Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards: Best Lead Actor and Best Cast.[158] On January 11, 2015, Clooney was awarded the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award.

en/2175.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,177 @@

+George Herbert Walker Bush[a] (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018) was an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993. A member of the Republican Party, Bush also served in the U.S. House of Representatives, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as Director of Central Intelligence, and as the 43rd vice president.
+Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and attended Phillips Academy before serving in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Yale University and moved to West Texas, where he established a successful oil company. After an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate, he won election to the 7th congressional district of Texas in 1966. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and to the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed him as the Chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China, and in 1976 Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence. Bush ran for president in 1980, but was defeated in the Republican presidential primaries by Ronald Reagan. He was then elected vice president in 1980 and 1984 as Reagan's running mate.
+In the 1988 presidential election, Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, becoming the first incumbent vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency, as he navigated the final years of the Cold War and played a key role in the reunification of Germany. Bush presided over the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in the latter conflict. Though the agreement was not ratified until after he left office, Bush negotiated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a trade bloc consisting of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Domestically, Bush reneged on a 1988 campaign promise by signing a bill that increased taxes and helped reduce the federal budget deficit. He also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and appointed David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Bush lost the 1992 presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton following an economic recession and the decreased emphasis of foreign policy in a post–Cold War political climate.
+After leaving office in 1993, Bush was active in humanitarian activities, often working alongside Clinton, his former opponent. With the victory of his son, George W. Bush, in the 2000 presidential election, the two became the second father–son pair to serve as the nation's president, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Another son, Jeb Bush, unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 Republican primaries. After a long battle with vascular Parkinson's disease, Bush died at his home on November 30, 2018. Historians generally rank Bush as an above average president.
+George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts[2] on June 12, 1924. He was the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy (Walker) Bush.[3] His paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, worked as an executive for a railroad parts company in Columbus, Ohio,[4] and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, led Wall Street investment bank W. A. Harriman & Co.[5] Bush was named after his maternal grandfather, who was known as "Pop", and young Bush was called "Poppy" as a tribute to his namesake.[6] The Bush family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut in 1925, and Prescott took a position with W. A. Harriman & Co. (which later merged into Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) the following year.[7]
+Bush spent most of his childhood in Greenwich, at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine,[b] or at his maternal grandparents' plantation in South Carolina.[9] Because of the family's wealth, Bush was largely unaffected by the Great Depression, a major economic downturn that led to high levels of unemployment for much of the 1930s.[10] He attended Greenwich Country Day School from 1929 to 1937[11] and Phillips Academy, an elite private academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1937 to 1942.[12] While at Phillips Academy, he served as president of the senior class, secretary of the student council, president of the community fund-raising group, a member of the editorial board of the school newspaper, and captain of the varsity baseball and soccer teams.[13]
+On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, marking the start of U.S. participation in World War II. On his 18th birthday, immediately after graduating from Phillips Academy, he enlisted in the United States Navy as a naval aviator.[14] After a period of training, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi on June 9, 1943, becoming one of the youngest aviators in the Navy.[15][c] Beginning in 1944, Bush served in the Pacific theater of World War II, where he flew a Grumman TBF Avenger, a torpedo bomber capable of taking off from aircraft carriers.[20] His squadron was assigned to the USS San Jacinto as a member of Air Group 51, where his lanky physique earned him the nickname "Skin".[21]
+Bush flew his first combat mission in May 1944, bombing Japanese-held Wake Island,[22] and was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on August 1, 1944. During an attack on a Japanese installation in Chichijima, Bush's aircraft successfully attacked several targets, but was downed by enemy fire.[19] Though both of Bush's fellow crew members died, Bush successfully bailed out from the aircraft and was rescued by the USS Finback.[23][d] Several of the aviators shot down during the attack were captured and executed, and their livers were eaten by their captors.[24] Bush's near-death experience shaped him profoundly, leading him to ask, "Why had I been spared and what did God have for me?"[25] He was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his role in the mission.[26]
+Bush returned to San Jacinto in November 1944, participating in operations in the Philippines.[19] In early 1945, he was assigned to a new combat squadron, VT-153, where he trained to take part in an invasion of mainland Japan. On September 2, 1945, before any invasion took place, Japan formally surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[27] Bush was released from active duty that same month, but was not formally discharged from the navy until October 1955, at which point he had reached the rank of lieutenant.[19] By the end of his period of active service, Bush had flown 58 missions, completed 128 carrier landings, and recorded 1228 hours of flight time.[28]
+Bush met Barbara Pierce at a Christmas dance in Greenwich in December 1941,[29] and, after a period of courtship, they became engaged in December 1943.[30] While Bush was on leave from the navy, they married in Rye, New York, on January 6, 1945.[31] The Bushes enjoyed a strong marriage, and Barbara would later be a popular First Lady, seen by many as "a kind of national grandmother".[32][e] The marriage produced six children: George W. (b. 1946), Robin (b. 1949), Jeb (b. 1953), Neil (b. 1955), Marvin (b. 1956), and Doro (b. 1959).[14] Their oldest daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.[35]
+Following the end of World War II, Bush enrolled at Yale University, where he took part in an accelerated program that enabled him to graduate in two and a half years rather than the usual four.[14] He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was elected its president.[36] He also captained the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series as a left-handed first baseman.[37] Like his father, he was a member of the Yale cheerleading squad[38] and was initiated into the Skull and Bones secret society. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in economics and minoring in sociology.[39]
+After graduating from Yale, Bush moved his young family to West Texas. Biographer Jon Meacham writes that Bush's relocation to Texas allowed him to move out of the "daily shadow of his Wall Street father and Grandfather Walker, two dominant figures in the financial world", but would still allow Bush to "call on their connections if he needed to raise capital."[40] His first position in Texas was an oil field equipment salesman[41] for Dresser Industries, which was led by family friend Neil Mallon.[42] While working for Dresser, Bush lived in various places with his family: Odessa, Texas; Ventura, Bakersfield and Compton, California; and Midland, Texas.[43] In 1952, he volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. That same year, his father won election to represent Connecticut in the United States Senate as a member of the Republican Party.[44]
+With support from Mallon and Bush's uncle, George Herbert Walker Jr., Bush and John Overbey launched the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company in 1951.[45] In 1953 he co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas.[46] In 1954, he was named president of the Zapata Offshore Company, a subsidiary which specialized in offshore drilling.[47] Shortly after the subsidiary became independent in 1959, Bush moved the company and his family from Midland to Houston.[48] In Houston, he befriended James Baker, a prominent attorney who later became an important political ally.[49] Bush remained involved with Zapata until the mid-1960s, when he sold his stock in the company for approximately $1 million.[50] In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this allegation.[51]
+By the early 1960s, Bush was widely regarded as an appealing political candidate, and some leading Democrats attempted to convince Bush to become a Democrat. He declined to leave the Republican Party, later citing his belief that the national Democratic Party favored "big, centralized government". The Democratic Party had historically dominated Texas, but Republicans scored their first major victory in the state with John G. Tower's victory in a 1961 special election to the United States Senate. Motivated by Tower's victory, and hoping to prevent the far-right John Birch Society from coming to power, Bush ran for the chairmanship of the Harris County, Texas Republican Party, winning election in February 1963.[52] Like most other Texas Republicans, Bush supported conservative Senator Barry Goldwater over the more centrist Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican Party presidential primaries.[53]
+In 1964, Bush sought to unseat liberal Democrat Ralph W. Yarborough in Texas's U.S. Senate election.[54] Bolstered by superior fundraising, Bush won the Republican primary by defeating former gubernatorial nominee Jack Cox in a run-off election. In the general election, Bush attacked Yarborough's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial and gender discrimination in public institutions and in many privately owned businesses. Bush argued that the act unconstitutionally expanded the powers of the federal government, but he was privately uncomfortable with the racial politics of opposing the act.[55] He lost the election 56 percent to 44 percent, though he did run well ahead of Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee.[54] Despite the loss, the New York Times reported that Bush was "rated by political friend and foe alike as the Republicans' best prospect in Texas because of his attractive personal qualities and the strong campaign he put up for the Senate".[56]
+In 1966, Bush ran for the United States House of Representatives in Texas's 7th congressional district, a newly redistricted seat in the Greater Houston area. Initial polling showed him trailing his Democratic opponent, Harris County District Attorney Frank Briscoe, but he ultimately won the race with 57 percent of the vote.[57] In an effort to woo potential candidates in the South and Southwest, House Republicans secured Bush an appointment to the powerful United States House Committee on Ways and Means, making Bush the first freshman to serve on the committee since 1904.[58] His voting record in the House was generally conservative. He supported the Nixon administration's Vietnam policies, but broke with Republicans on the issue of birth control, which he supported. He also voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, although it was generally unpopular in his district.[59][60] In 1968, Bush joined several other Republicans in issuing the party's Response to the State of the Union address; Bush's part of the address focused on a call for fiscal responsibility.[61]
+Though most other Texas Republicans supported Ronald Reagan in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries, Bush endorsed Richard Nixon, who went on to win the party's nomination. Nixon considered selecting Bush as his running mate in the 1968 presidential election, but he ultimately chose Spiro Agnew instead. Bush won re-election to the House unopposed, while Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election.[62] In 1970, with President Nixon's support, Bush gave up his seat in the House to run for the Senate against Yarborough. Bush easily won the Republican primary, but Yarborough was defeated by the more centrist Lloyd Bentsen in the Democratic primary.[63] Ultimately, Bentsen defeated Bush, taking 53.5 percent of the vote.[64]
+After the 1970 Senate election, Bush accepted a position as a senior adviser to the president, but he convinced Nixon to instead appoint him as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.[65] The position represented Bush's first foray into foreign policy, as well as his first major experiences with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the two major U.S. rivals in the Cold War.[66] During Bush's tenure, the Nixon administration pursued a policy of détente, seeking to ease tensions with both the Soviet Union and China.[67] Bush's ambassadorship was marked by a defeat on the China question, as the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel the Republic of China and replace it with the People's Republic of China in October 1971.[68] In the 1971 crisis in Pakistan, Bush supported an Indian motion at the UN General Assembly to condemn the Pakistani government of Yahya Khan for waging genocide in East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh), referring to the "tradition which we have supported that the human rights question transcended domestic jurisdiction and should be freely debated".[69] Bush's support for India at the UN put him into conflict with Nixon who was supporting Pakistan, partly because Yahya Khan was a useful intermediary in his attempts to reach out to China and partly because the president was fond of Yahya Khan.[70]
+After Nixon won a landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, he appointed Bush as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).[71][72] In that position, he was charged with fundraising, candidate recruitment, and making appearances on behalf of the party in the media.
+When Agnew was being investigated for corruption, Bush assisted, at the request of Nixon and Agnew, in pressuring John Glenn Beall Jr., the U.S. Senator from Maryland to force his brother, George Beall the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, who was supervising the investigation into Agnew.  Attorney Beall ignored the pressure.[73]
+During Bush's tenure at the RNC, the Watergate scandal emerged into public view; the scandal originated from the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee, but also involved later efforts to cover up the break-in by Nixon and other members of the White House.[74] Bush initially defended Nixon steadfastly, but as Nixon's complicity became clear he focused more on defending the Republican Party.[59]
+Following the resignation of Vice President Agnew in 1973 for a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Bush was considered for the position of vice president, but the appointment instead went to Gerald Ford.[75] After the public release of an audio recording that confirmed that Nixon had plotted to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, Bush joined other party leaders in urging Nixon to resign.[76] When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Bush noted in his diary that "There was an aura of sadness, like somebody died... The [resignation] speech was vintage Nixon—a kick or two at the press—enormous strains. One couldn't help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame... [President Gerald Ford's swearing-in offered] indeed a new spirit, a new lift."[77]
+Upon his ascension to the presidency, Ford strongly considered Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Nelson Rockefeller for the vacant position of vice president. Ford ultimately chose Nelson Rockefeller, partly because of the publication of a news report claiming that Bush's 1970 campaign had benefited from a secret fund set up by Nixon; Bush was later cleared of any suspicion by a special prosecutor.[78] Bush accepted appointment as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, making the him the de facto ambassador to China.[79] According to biographer Jon Meacham, Bush's time in China convinced him that American engagement abroad was needed to ensure global stability, and that the United States "needed to be visible but not pushy, muscular but not domineering."[80]
+In January 1976, Ford brought Bush back to Washington to become the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), placing him in charge of the CIA.[81] In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, the CIA's reputation had been damaged for its role in various covert operations, and Bush was tasked with restoring the agency's morale and public reputation.[82][f] During Bush's year in charge of the CIA, the U.S. national security apparatus actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.[83][84] Meanwhile, Ford decided to drop Rockefeller from the ticket for the 1976 presidential election; he considered Bush as his running mate, but ultimately chose Bob Dole.[85] In his capacity as DCI, Bush gave national security briefings to Jimmy Carter both as a presidential candidate and as president-elect.[86]
+Bush's tenure at the CIA ended after Carter narrowly defeated Ford in the 1976 presidential election. Out of public office for the first time since the 1960s, Bush became chairman on the Executive Committee of the First International Bank in Houston.[87] He also spent a year as a part-time professor of Administrative Science at Rice University's Jones School of Business,[88] continued his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, and joined the Trilateral Commission. Meanwhile, he began to lay the groundwork for his candidacy in the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries.[89] In the 1980 Republican primary campaign, Bush would face Ronald Reagan, who was widely regarded as the front-runner, as well as other contenders like Senator Bob Dole, Senator Howard Baker, Texas Governor John Connally, Congressman Phil Crane, and Congressman John B. Anderson.[90]
+Bush's campaign cast him as a youthful, "thinking man's candidate" who would emulate the pragmatic conservatism of President Eisenhower.[91] In the midst of the Soviet–Afghan War, which brought an end to a period of détente, and the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 Americans were taken hostage, the campaign highlighted Bush's foreign policy experience.[92] At the outset of the race, Bush focused heavily on winning the January 21 Iowa caucuses, making 31 visits to the state.[93] Ultimately, he won a close victory Iowa with 31.5% to Reagan's 29.4%. After the win, Bush stated that his campaign was full of momentum, or "the Big Mo",[94] and Reagan reorganized his campaign.[95] Partly in response to the Bush campaign's frequent questioning of Reagan's age (Reagan turned 69 in 1980), the Reagan campaign stepped up attacks on Bush, painting him as an elitist who was not truly committed to conservatism.[96] Prior to the New Hampshire primary, Bush and Reagan agreed to a two-person debate, organized by The Nashua Telegraph but paid for by the Reagan campaign.[95]
+Days before the debate, Reagan announced that he would invite four other candidates to the debate; Bush, who had hoped that the one-on-one debate would allow him to emerge as the main alternative to Reagan in the primaries, refused to debate the other candidate. All six candidates took the stage, but Bush refused to speak in the presence of the other candidates. Ultimately, the other four candidates left the stage and the debate continued, but Bush's refusal to debate anyone other than Reagan badly damaged his campaign in New Hampshire.[97] He ended up decisively losing New Hampshire's primary to Reagan, winning just 23 percent of the vote.[95] Bush revitalized his campaign with a victory in Massachusetts, but lost the next several primaries. As Reagan built up a commanding delegate lead, Bush refused to end his campaign, but the other candidates dropped out of the race.[98] Criticizing his more conservative rival's policy proposals, Bush famously labeled Reagan's supply side-influenced plans for massive tax cuts as "voodoo economics".[99] Though he favored lower taxes, Bush feared that dramatic reductions in taxation would lead to deficits and, in turn, cause inflation.[100]
+After Reagan clinched a majority of delegates in late May, Bush reluctantly dropped out of the race.[101] At the 1980 Republican National Convention, Reagan made the last-minute decision to select Bush as his vice presidential nominee after negotiations with Ford regarding a Reagan-Ford ticket collapsed.[102] Though Reagan had resented many of the Bush campaign's attacks during the primary campaign, and several conservative leaders had actively opposed Bush's nomination, Reagan ultimately decided that Bush's popularity with moderate Republicans made him the best and safest pick.[103] Bush, who had believed his political career might be over following the primaries, eagerly accepted the position and threw himself into campaigning for the Reagan-Bush ticket.[104] The 1980 general election campaign between Reagan and Carter was conducted amid a multitude of domestic concerns and the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, and Reagan sought to focus the race on Carter's handling of the economy.[105] Though the race was widely regarded as a close contest for most of the campaign, Reagan ultimately won over the large majority of undecided voters.[106] Reagan took 50.7 percent of the popular vote and 489 of the 538 electoral votes, while Carter won 41% of the popular vote and John Anderson, running as an independent candidate, won 6.6% of the popular vote.[107]
+As vice president, Bush generally maintained a low profile, recognizing the constitutional limits of the office; he avoided decision-making or criticizing Reagan in any way. This approach helped him earn Reagan's trust, easing tensions left over from their earlier rivalry.[95] Bush also generally enjoyed a good relationship with Reagan staffers, including his close friend Jim Baker, who served as Reagan's initial chief of staff.[108] His understanding of the vice presidency was heavily influenced by Vice President Walter Mondale, who enjoyed a strong relationship with President Carter in part because of his ability to avoid confrontations with senior staff and Cabinet members, and by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's difficult relationship with some members of the White House staff during the Ford administration.[109] The Bushes attended a large number of public and ceremonial events in their positions, including many state funerals, which became a common joke for comedians. As the President of the Senate, Bush also stayed in contact with members of Congress and kept the president informed on occurrences on Capitol Hill.[95]
+On March 30, 1981, while Bush was in Texas, Reagan was shot and seriously wounded by John Hinckley Jr. Bush immediately flew back from Washington D.C.; when his plane landed, his aides advised him to proceed directly to the White House by helicopter in order to show that the government was still functioning.[95] Bush rejected the idea, as he feared that such a dramatic scene risked giving the impression that he sought to usurp Reagan's powers and prerogatives.[110] During Reagan's short period of incapacity, Bush presided over Cabinet meetings, met with congressional leaders and foreign leaders, and briefed reporters, but he consistently rejected the possibility of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment.[111] Bush's handling of the attempted assassination and its aftermath made a positive impression on Reagan, who recovered and returned to work within two weeks of the shooting. From then on, the two men would have regular Thursday lunches in the Oval Office.[112]
+Bush was assigned by Reagan to chair two special task forces, one on deregulation and one on international drug smuggling. Both were popular issues with conservatives, and Bush, largely a moderate, began courting them through his work. The deregulation task force reviewed hundreds of rules, making specific recommendations on which ones to amend or revise, in order to curb the size of the federal government.[95] The Reagan administration's deregulation push had a strong impact on broadcasting, finance, resource extraction, and other economic activities, and the administration eliminated numerous government positions.[113] Bush also oversaw the administration's national security crisis management organization, which had traditionally been the responsibility of the National Security Advisor.[114] In 1983, Bush toured Western Europe as part of the Reagan administration's ultimately successful efforts to convince skeptical NATO allies to support the deployment of Pershing II missiles.[115]
+Reagan's approval ratings fell after his first year in office, but they bounced back when the United States began to emerge from recession in 1983.[116] Former Vice President Walter Mondale was nominated by the Democratic Party in the 1984 presidential election. Down in the polls, Mondale selected Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in hopes of galvanizing support for his campaign, thus making Ferraro the first female major party vice presidential nominee in U.S. history.[117] She and Bush squared off in a single televised vice presidential debate.[95] Public opinion polling consistently showed a Reagan lead in the 1984 campaign, and Mondale was unable to shake up the race.[118] In the end, Reagan won re-election, winning 49 of 50 states and receiving 59% of the popular vote to Mondale's 41%.[119]
+Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985; less ideologically rigid than his predecessors, Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union urgently needed economic and political reforms.[120] At the 1987 Washington Summit, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which committed both signatories to the total abolition of their respective short-range and medium-range missile stockpiles.[121] The treaty marked the beginning of a new era of trade, openness, and cooperation between the two powers.[122] Though President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz took the lead in these negotiations, Bush sat in on many meetings and promised Gorbachev that he would seek to continue improving Soviet-U.S. relations if he succeeded Reagan.[123] On July 13, 1985, Bush became the first vice president to serve as acting president when Reagan underwent surgery to remove polyps from his colon; Bush served as the acting president for approximately eight hours.[124]
+In 1986, the Reagan administration was shaken by a scandal when it was revealed that administration officials had secretly arranged weapon sales to Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. The officials had used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, which was a direct violation of law.[95] When news of affair broke to the media, Bush, like Reagan, stated that he had been "out of the loop" and unaware of the diversion of funds, although this has assertion has since been challenged.[125] Biographer Jon Meacham writes that "no evidence was ever produced proving Bush was aware of the diversion to the contras," but he criticizes Bush's "out of the loop" characterization, writing that the "record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages".[126] The Iran–Contra scandal, as it became known, did serious damage to the Reagan presidency, raising questions about Reagan's competency.[127] Congress established the Tower Commission to investigate the scandal, and, at Reagan's request, a panel of federal judges appointed Lawrence Walsh as a special prosecutor charged with investigating the Iran–Contra scandal.[128] The investigations continued after Reagan left office and, though Bush was never charged with a crime, the Iran–Contra scandal would remain a political liability for him.[129]
+Bush began planning for a presidential run after the 1984 election, and he officially entered the 1988 Republican Party presidential primaries in October 1987.[95] He put together a campaign led by Reagan staffer Lee Atwater, and which also included his son, George W. Bush, and media consultant Roger Ailes.[130] Though he had moved to the right during his time as vice president, endorsing a Human Life Amendment and repudiating his earlier comments on "voodoo economics," Bush still faced opposition from many conservatives in the Republican Party.[131] His major rivals for the Republican nomination were Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, and Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.[132] Reagan did not publicly endorse any candidate, but he privately expressed support for Bush.[133]
+Though considered the early front-runner for the nomination, Bush came in third in the Iowa caucus, behind Dole and Robertson.[134] Much as Reagan had done in 1980, Bush reorganized his staff and concentrated on the New Hampshire primary.[95] With help from Governor John H. Sununu and an effective campaign attacking Dole for raising taxes, Bush overcame an initial polling deficit and won New Hampshire with 39 percent of the vote.[135] After Bush won South Carolina and 16 of the 17 states holding a primary on Super Tuesday, his competitors dropped out of the race.[136]
+Bush, occasionally criticized for his lack of eloquence when compared to Reagan, delivered a well-received speech at the Republican convention. Known as the "thousand points of light" speech, it described Bush's vision of America: he endorsed the Pledge of Allegiance, prayer in schools, capital punishment, and gun rights.[137] Bush also pledged that he would not raise taxes, stating: "Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And all I can say to them is: read my lips. No new taxes."[138] Bush selected little-known Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. Though Quayle had compiled an unremarkable record in Congress, he was popular among many conservatives, and the campaign hoped that Quayle's youth would appeal to younger voters.[139]
+Meanwhile, the Democratic Party nominated Governor Michael Dukakis, who was known for presiding over an economic turnaround in Massachusetts.[140] Leading in the general election polls against Bush, Dukakis ran an ineffective, low-risk campaign.[141] The Bush campaign attacked Dukakis as an unpatriotic liberal extremist and seized on Dukakis's pardon of Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who had raped a woman while on a prison furlough. The Bush campaign charged that Dukakis presided over a "revolving door" that allowed dangerous convicted felons to leave prison.[142] Dukakis damaged his own campaign with a widely mocked ride in an M1 Abrams tank and a poor performance at the second presidential debate.[143] Bush also attacked Dukakis for opposing a law that would require all students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[137] The election is widely considered to have had a high level of negative campaigning, though political scientist John Geer has argued that the share of negative ads was in line with previous presidential elections.[144]
+Bush defeated Dukakis by a margin of 426 to 111 in the Electoral College, and he took 53.4 percent of the national popular vote.[145] Bush ran well in all the major regions of the country, but especially in the South.[146] He became the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, the first person to succeed a president from his own party via election since Herbert Hoover in 1929.[95][g] In the concurrent congressional elections, Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.[148]
+Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 1989, succeeding Ronald Reagan. In his inaugural address, Bush said:
+I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken.[149]
+Bush's first major appointment was that of James Baker as Secretary of State.[150] Leadership of the Department of Defense went to Dick Cheney, who had had previously served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff and would later serve as vice president under George W. Bush.[151] Jack Kemp joined the administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, while Elizabeth Dole, the wife of Bob Dole and a former Secretary of Transportation, became the Secretary of Labor under Bush.[152] Bush retained several Reagan officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos.[153] New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, a strong supporter of Bush during the 1988 campaign, became chief of staff.[150] Brent Scowcroft was appointed as the National Security Advisor, a role he had also held under Ford.[154]
+During the first year of his tenure, Bush pursued what Soviets referred to as the pauza, a break in Reagan's détente policies.[155] Bush and his advisers were initially divided on Gorbachev; some administration officials saw him as a democratic reformer, but others suspected him of trying to make the minimum changes necessary to restore the Soviet Union to a competitive position with the United States.[156] In 1989, Communist governments fell in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the governments of Bulgaria and Romania instituted major reforms, and the government of East Germany opened the Berlin Wall, which was subsequently demolished by Berliners.[157] Many Soviet leaders urged Gorbachev to crush the dissidents in Eastern Europe, but Gorbachev declined to send in the Soviet military, effectively abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine.[158] The U.S. was not directly involved in these upheavals, but the Bush administration avoided the appearance of gloating over the demise of the Eastern Bloc to avoid undermining further democratic reforms.[157] Bush also helped convince Polish leaders to allow democratic elections and became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hungary.[159]
+By mid-1989, as unrest blanketed Eastern Europe, Bush requested a meeting with Gorbachev, and the two agreed to hold the December 1989 Malta Summit.[158] Though many on the right remained wary of Gorbachev, Bush came away from the Malta Summit with the belief that Gorbachev would negotiate in good faith.[160] For the remainder of his term, Bush sought cooperative relations with Gorbachev, believing that the Soviet leader was the key to peacefully ending the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.[161] The key issue at the Malta Summit was the potential reunification of Germany.[162] While Britain and France were wary of a re-unified Germany, Bush joined West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in pushing for German reunification.[163] Bush believed that a reunified Germany would serve U.S. interests, but he also saw reunification as providing a final symbolic end to World War II.[164] After extensive negotiations, Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to be a part of NATO, and Germany officially reunified in October 1990.[165]
+Though Gorbachev acquiesced to the democratization of Soviet satellite states, he suppressed nationalist movements within the Soviet Union itself.[166] A crisis in Lithuania left Bush in a difficult position, as he needed Gorbachev's cooperation in the reunification of Germany and feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union could leave nuclear arms in dangerous hands. The Bush administration mildly protested Gorbachev's suppression of Lithuania's independence movement, but took no action to directly intervene.[167] Bush warned independence movements of the disorder that could come with secession from the Soviet Union; in a 1991 address that critics labeled the "Chicken Kiev speech", he cautioned against "suicidal nationalism".[168] In July 1991, Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) treaty, in which both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent.[169]
+In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government.[170] Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until December 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.[171] Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, and of those states, Russia was the largest and most populous. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership".[172] In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.[173] The collapse of the Soviet Union prompted reflections on the future of the world following the end of the Cold War; one political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, speculated that humanity had reached the "end of history" in that liberal, capitalist democracy had permanently triumphed over Communism and fascism.[174] Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments led to post-Soviet conflicts in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa that would continue long after Bush left office.[175]
+During the 1980s, the U.S. had provided aid to Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, an anti-Communist dictator who engaged in drug trafficking. In May 1989, Noriega annulled the results of a democratic presidential election in which Guillermo Endara had been elected. Bush objected to the annulment of the election and worried about the status of the Panama Canal with Noriega still in office.[176] Bush dispatched 2,000 soldiers to the country, where they began conducting regular military exercises in violation of prior treaties.[177] After a U.S. serviceman was shot by Panamanian forces in December 1989, Bush ordered the United States invasion of Panama, known as "Operation Just Cause". The invasion was the first large-scale American military operation in more than 40 years that was not related to the Cold War. American forces quickly took control of the Panama Canal Zone and Panama City. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was quickly transported to a prison in the United States. Twenty-three Americans died in the operation, while another 394 were wounded. Noriega was convicted and imprisoned on racketeering and drug trafficking charges in April 1992.[176] Historian Stewart Brewer argues that the invasion "represented a new era in American foreign policy" because Bush did not justify the invasion under the Monroe Doctrine or the threat of Communism, but rather on the grounds that it was in the best interests of the United States.[178]
+Faced with massive debts and low oil prices in the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein decided to conquer the country of Kuwait, a small, oil-rich country situated on Iraq's southern border.[179] After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush imposed economic sanctions on Iraq and assembled a multi-national coalition opposed to the invasion.[180] The administration feared that a failure to respond to the invasion would embolden Hussein to attack Saudi Arabia or Israel, and wanted to discourage other countries from similar aggression.[181] Bush also wanted to ensure continued access to oil, as Iraq and Kuwait collectively accounted for 20 percent of the world's oil production, and Saudi Arabia produced another 26 percent of the world's oil supply.[182]
+At Bush's insistence, in November 1990, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not withdrawal from Kuwait by January 15, 1991.[183] Gorbachev's support, as well as China's abstention, helped ensure passage of the UN resolution.[184] Bush convinced Britain, France, and other nations to commit soldiers to an operation against Iraq, and he won important financial backing from Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.[185] In January 1991, Bush asked Congress to approve a joint resolution authorizing a war against Iraq.[186] Bush believed that the UN resolution had already provided him with the necessary authorization to launch a military operation against Iraq, but he wanted to show that the nation was united behind a military action.[187] Despite the opposition of a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991.[186]
+After the January 15 deadline passed without an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces began a conducted a bombing campaign that devastated Iraq's power grid and communications network, and resulted in the desertion of about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers. In retaliation, Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but most of the missiles did little damage. On February 23, coalition forces began a ground invasion into Kuwait, evicting Iraqi forces by the end of February 27. About 300 Americans, as well as approximately 65 soldiers from other coalition nations, died during the military action.[188] A cease fire was arranged on March 3, and the UN passed a resolution establishing a peacekeeping force in a demilitarized zone between Kuwait and Iraq.[189] A March 1991 Gallup poll showed that Bush had an approval rating of 89 percent, the highest presidential approval rating in the history of Gallup polling.[190] After 1991, the UN maintained economic sanctions against Iraq, and the United Nations Special Commission was assigned to ensure that Iraq did not revive its weapons of mass destruction program.[191]
+In 1987, the U.S. and Canada had reached a free trade agreement that eliminated many tariffs between the two countries. President Reagan had intended it as the first step towards a larger trade agreement to eliminate most tariffs among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.[192] The Bush administration, along with the Progressive Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, spearheaded the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. In addition to lowering tariffs, the proposed treaty would affected patents, copyrights, and trademarks.[193] In 1991, Bush sought fast track authority, which grants the president the power to submit an international trade agreement to Congress without the possibility of amendment. Despite congressional opposition led by House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, both houses of Congress voted to grant Bush fast track authority. NAFTA was signed in December 1992, after Bush lost re-election,[194] but President Clinton won ratification of NAFTA in 1993.[195] NAFTA remains controversial for its impact on wages, jobs, and overall economic growth.[196]
+The U.S. economy had generally performed well since emerging from recession in late 1982, but it slipped into a mild recession in 1990. The unemployment rate rose from 5.9 percent in 1989 to a high of 7.8 percent in mid-1991.[197][198] Large federal deficits, spawned during the Reagan years, rose from $152.1 billion in 1989[199] to $220 billion for 1990;[200] the $220 billion deficit represented a threefold increase since 1980.[201] As the public became increasingly concerned about the economy and other domestic affairs, Bush's well-received handling of foreign affairs became less of an issue for most voters.[202] Bush's top domestic priority was to bring an end to federal budget deficits, which he saw as a liability for the country's long-term economic health and standing in the world.[203] As he was opposed to major defense spending cuts[204] and had pledged to not raise taxes, the president had major difficulties in balancing the budget.[205]
+Bush and congressional leaders agreed to avoid major changes to the budget for fiscal year 1990, which began in October 1989. However, both sides knew that spending cuts or new taxes would be necessary in the following year's budget in order to avoid the draconian automatic domestic spending cuts required by the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1987.[206] Bush and other leaders also wanted to cut deficits because Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan refused to lower interest rates, and thus stimulate economic growth, unless the federal budget deficit was reduced.[207] In a statement released in late June 1990, Bush said that he would be open to a deficit reduction program which included spending cuts, incentives for economic growth, budget process reform, as well as tax increases.[208] To fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party, Bush's statement represented a betrayal, and they heavily criticized him for compromising so early in the negotiations.[209]
+In September 1990, Bush and Congressional Democrats announced a compromise to cut funding for mandatory and discretionary programs while also raising revenue, partly through a higher gas tax. The compromise additionally included a "pay as you go" provision that required that new programs be paid for at the time of implementation.[210] House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich led the conservative opposition to the bill, strongly opposing any form of tax increase.[211] Some liberals also criticized the budget cuts in the compromise, and in October, the House rejected the deal, resulting in a brief government shutdown. Without the strong backing of the Republican Party, Bush agreed to another compromise bill, this one more favorable to Democrats. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA-90), enacted on October 27, 1990, dropped much of the gasoline tax increase in favor of higher income taxes on top earners. It included cuts to domestic spending, but the cuts were not as deep as those that had been proposed in the original compromise. Bush's decision to sign the bill damaged his standing with conservatives and the general public, but it also laid the groundwork for the budget surpluses of the late 1990s.[212]
+-Bush's remarks at the signing ceremony for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990[213]
+The disabled had not received legal protections under the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many faced discrimination and segregation by the time Bush took office. In 1988, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and Tony Coelho had introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act, which barred employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities. The bill had passed the Senate but not the House, and it was reintroduced in 1989. Though some conservatives opposed the bill due to its costs and potential burdens on businesses, Bush strongly supported it, partly because his son, Neil, had struggled with dyslexia. After the bill passed both houses of Congress, Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 into law in July 1990.[214] The act required employers and public accommodations to make "reasonable accommodations" for the disabled, while providing an exception when such accommodations imposed an "undue hardship".[215]
+Senator Ted Kennedy later led the congressional passage of a separate civil rights bill designed to facilitate launching employment discrimination lawsuits.[216] In vetoing the bill, Bush argued that it would lead to racial quotas in hiring.[217][218] In November 1991, Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which was largely similar to the bill he had vetoed in the previous year.[216]
+In August 1990, Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded program dedicated to assisting persons living with HIV/AIDS.[219] Throughout his presidency, the AIDS epidemic grew dramatically in the U.S. and around the world, and Bush often found himself at odds with AIDS activist groups who criticized him for not placing a high priority on HIV/AIDS research and funding. Frustrated by the administration's lack of urgency on the issue, ACT UP, dumped the ashes of HIV/AIDS victims on the White House lawn during a viewing of the AIDS Quilt in 1992.[220] By that time, HIV had become the leading cause of death in the U.S. for men aged 25–44.[221]
+In June 1989, the Bush administration proposed a bill to amend the Clean Air Act. Working with Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, the administration won passage of the amendments over the opposition of business-aligned members of Congress who feared the impact of tougher regulations.[222] The legislation sought to curb acid rain and smog by requiring decreased emissions of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide,[223] and was the first major update to the Clean Air Act since 1977.[224] Bush also signed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. However, the League of Conservation Voters criticized some of Bush's other environmental actions, including his opposition to stricter auto-mileage standards.[225]
+President Bush devoted attention to voluntary service as a means of solving some of America's most serious social problems. He often used the "thousand points of light" theme to describe the power of citizens to solve community problems. In his 1989 inaugural address, President Bush said, "I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good."[226] During his presidency, Bush honored numerous volunteers with the Daily Point of Light Award, a tradition that was continued by his presidential successors.[227] In 1990, the Points of Light Foundation was created as a nonprofit organization in Washington to promote this spirit of volunteerism.[228] In 2007, the Points of Light Foundation merged with the Hands On Network to create a new organization, Points of Light.[229]
+Bush appointed two justices to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1990, Bush appointed a largely unknown state appellate judge, David Souter, to replace liberal icon William Brennan.[230] Souter was easily confirmed and served until 2009, but joined the liberal bloc of the court, disappointing Bush.[230] In 1991, Bush nominated conservative federal judge Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall, a long-time liberal stalwart. Thomas, the former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), faced heavy opposition in the Senate, as well as from pro-choice groups and the NAACP. His nomination faced another difficulty when Anita Hill accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her during his time as the chair of EEOC. Thomas won confirmation in a narrow 52–48 vote; 43 Republicans and 9 Democrats voted to confirm Thomas's nomination, while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against confirmation.[231] Thomas became one of the most conservative justices of his era.[232] In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 42 judges to the United States courts of appeals, and 148 judges to the United States district courts. Among these appointments were future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as well as Vaughn R. Walker, who was later revealed to be the earliest known gay federal judge.[233]
+Bush's education platform consisted mainly of offering federal support for a variety of innovations, such as open enrollment, incentive pay for outstanding teachers, and rewards for schools that improve performance with underprivileged children.[234] Though Bush did not pass a major educational reform package during his presidency, his ideas influenced later reform efforts, including Goals 2000 and the No Child Left Behind Act.[235] Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990,[236] which led to a 40 percent increase in legal immigration to the United States.[237] The act more than doubled the number of visas given to immigrants on the basis of job skills.[238] In the wake of the savings and loan crisis, Bush proposed a $50 billion package to rescue the savings and loans industry, and also proposed the creation of the Office of Thrift Supervision to regulate the industry. Congress passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, which incorporated most of Bush's proposals.[239]
+Bush was widely seen as a "pragmatic caretaker" president who lacked a unified and compelling long-term theme in his efforts.[240][241][242] Indeed, Bush's sound bite where he refers to the issue of overarching purpose as "the vision thing" has become a metonym applied to other political figures accused of similar difficulties.[243][244][245][246][247][248] His ability to gain broad international support for the Gulf War and the war's result were seen as both a diplomatic and military triumph,[249] rousing bipartisan approval,[250] though his decision to withdraw without removing Saddam Hussein left mixed feelings, and attention returned to the domestic front and a souring economy.[251] A New York Times article mistakenly depicted Bush as being surprised to see a supermarket barcode reader;[252][253] the report of his reaction exacerbated the notion that he was "out of touch".[252] Amid the early 1990s recession, his image shifted from "conquering hero" to "politician befuddled by economic matters".[254]
+Bush announced his reelection bid in early 1992; with a coalition victory in the Persian Gulf War and high approval ratings, Bush's reelection initially looked likely.[255] As a result, many leading Democrats, including Mario Cuomo, Dick Gephardt, and Al Gore, declined to seek their party's presidential nomination.[256] However, Bush's tax increase had angered many conservatives, who believed that Bush had strayed from the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan.[257] He faced a challenge from conservative political columnist Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primaries.[258] Bush fended off Buchanan's challenge and won his party's nomination at the 1992 Republican National Convention, but the convention adopted a socially conservative platform strongly influenced by the Christian right.[259]
+Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. A moderate who was affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Clinton favored welfare reform, deficit reduction, and a tax cut for the middle class.[260] In early 1992, the race took an unexpected twist when Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot launched a third party bid, claiming that neither Republicans nor Democrats could eliminate the deficit and make government more efficient. His message appealed to voters across the political spectrum disappointed with both parties' perceived fiscal irresponsibility.[261] Perot also attacked NAFTA, which he claimed would lead to major job losses.[262] National polling taken in mid-1992 showed Perot in the lead, but Clinton experienced a surge through effective campaigning and the selection of Senator Al Gore, a popular and relatively young Southerner, as his running mate.[263]
+Clinton won the election, taking 43 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes, while Bush won 37.5 percent of the popular vote and 168 electoral votes.[264] Perot won 19% of the popular vote, one of the highest totals for a third party candidate in U.S. history, drawing equally from both major candidates, according to exit polls.[265] Clinton performed well in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast, while also waging the strongest Democratic campaign in the South since the 1976 election.[266] Several factors were important in Bush's defeat. The ailing economy which arose from recession may have been the main factor in Bush's loss, as 7 in 10 voters said on election day that the economy was either "not so good" or "poor".[267][268] On the eve of the 1992 election, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8%, which was the highest it had been since 1984.[269] The president was also damaged by his alienation of many conservatives in his party.[270] Bush blamed Perot in part for his defeat, though exit polls showed that Perot drew his voters about equally from Clinton and Bush.[271]
+Despite his defeat, Bush left office with a 56 percent job approval rating in January 1993.[272] Like many of his predecessors, Bush issued a series of pardons during his last days in office. In December 1992, he granted executive clemency to six former senior government officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, most prominently former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.[273] The pardons effectively brought an end to special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal.[274]
+After leaving office, Bush and his wife built a retirement house in the community of West Oaks, Houston.[275] He established a presidential office within the Park Laureate Building on Memorial Drive in Houston.[276] He also frequently spent time at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, took annual cruises in Greece, went on fishing trips in Florida, and visited the Bohemian Club in Northern California. He declined to serve on corporate boards, but delivered numerous paid speeches and served as an adviser to The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.[277] He never published his memoirs, but he and Brent Scowcroft co-wrote A World Transformed, a 1999 work on foreign policy. Portions of his letters and his diary were later published as The China Diary of George H. W. Bush and All The Best, George Bush.[278]
+During a 1993 visit to Kuwait, Bush was targeted in an assassination plot directed by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. President Clinton retaliated when he ordered the firing of 23 cruise missiles at Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad.[279] Bush did not publicly comment on the assassination attempt or the missile strike, but privately spoke with Clinton shortly before the strike took place.[280] In the 1994 gubernatorial elections, his sons George W. and Jeb concurrently ran for Governor of Texas and Governor of Florida. Concerning their political careers, he advised them both that "[a]t some point both of you may want to say 'Well, I don't agree with my Dad on that point' or 'Frankly I think Dad was wrong on that.' Do it. Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves".[281] George W. won his race against Ann Richards while Jeb lost to Lawton Chiles. After the results came in, the elder Bush told ABC, "I have very mixed emotions. Proud father, is the way I would sum it all up."[282] Jeb would again run for governor of Florida in 1998 and win at the same time that his brother George W. won re-election in Texas. It marked the second time in United States history that a pair of brothers served simultaneously as governors.[283]
+Bush supported his son's candidacy in the 2000 presidential election, but did not actively campaign in the election and did not deliver a speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention.[284] George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the 2000 election and was re-elected in 2004. Bush and his son thus became the second father–son pair to each serve as President of the United States, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.[285] Through previous administrations, the elder Bush had ubiquitously been known as "George Bush" or "President Bush", but following his son's election the need to distinguish between them has made retronymic forms such as "George H. W. Bush" and "George Bush Sr." and colloquialisms such as "Bush 41" and "Bush the Elder" more common.[286] Bush advised his son on some personnel choices, approving of the selection of Dick Cheney as running mate and the retention of George Tenet as CIA Director. However, he was not consulted on all appointments, including that of his old rival, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense.[287] Though he avoided giving unsolicited advice to his son, Bush and his son also discussed some matters of policy, especially regarding national security issues.[288]
+In his retirement, Bush generally avoided publicly expressing his opinion on political issues, instead using the public spotlight to support various charities.[289] Despite earlier political differences with Bill Clinton, the two former presidents eventually became friends.[290] They appeared together in television ads, encouraging aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.[291]
+Bush supported Republican John McCain in the 2008 presidential election,[292] and Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election,[293] but both were defeated by Democrat Barack Obama. In 2011, Obama awarded Bush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.[294]
+Bush supported his son Jeb's bid in the 2016 presidential election.[295] Jeb Bush's campaign struggled however, and he withdrew from the race during the primaries. Neither George H.W. nor George W. Bush endorsed the eventual Republican nominee, Donald Trump;[296] all three Bushes emerged as frequent critics of Trump's policies and speaking style, while Trump frequently criticized George W. Bush's presidency. George H. W. Bush later said that he voted for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the general election.[297] After the election, Bush wrote a letter to president-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 to inform him that because of his poor health, he would not be able to attend Trump's inauguration on January 20; he gave him his best wishes.[298]
+In August 2017, after the violence at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, both Presidents Bush released a joint statement saying, "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms," the statement from presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush reads. "As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights."[299][300]
+On April 17, 2018, Bush's wife Former First Lady Barbara Bush died at the age of 92,[301] at her home in Houston, Texas. Her funeral was held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston four days later.[302][303] Bush along with former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush (son), Bill Clinton and fellow First Ladies Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush (daughter-in-law) and Hillary Clinton were representatives who attended the funeral and who also took a photo together after the service as a sign of unity which went viral online.[304][305]
+On November 1, Bush went to the polls to vote early in the midterm elections. This would be his final public appearance.[306]
+George H. W. Bush died on November 30, 2018, aged 94 years, 171 days,[307] at his home in Houston.[308] At the time of his death he was the longest-lived U.S. president,[309] a distinction now held by Jimmy Carter.[310] He was also the third-oldest vice president.[h] Bush lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from December 3 through December 5; he was the 12th U.S. president to be accorded this honor.[312][313] Then, on December 5, Bush's casket was transferred from the Capitol rotunda to Washington National Cathedral where a state funeral was held.[314] After the funeral, Bush's body was transported to George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he was buried next to his wife Barbara and daughter Robin.[315] At the funeral, former president George W. Bush eulogized his father saying,
+"He looked for the good in each person, and he usually found it."[314]
+In 1991, The New York Times revealed that Bush was suffering from Graves' disease, a non-contagious thyroid condition that his wife Barbara also suffered from.[316] Later in life, Bush suffered from vascular parkinsonism, a form of Parkinson's disease which forced him to use a motorized scooter or wheelchair.[317]
+Bush was raised in the Episcopal Church, though by the end of his life his apparent religious beliefs are considered to have more in line with Evangelical Christian doctrine and practices.[318] He cited various moments in his life deepening of his faith, including his escape from Japanese forces in 1944, and the death of his three-year-old daughter Robin in 1953.[319] His faith was reflected in his Thousand Points of Light speech, his support for prayer in schools, and his support for the pro-life movement (following his election as vice president).[318][319]
+Polls of historians and political scientists have ranked Bush in the top half of presidents. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association's Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked Bush as the 17th best president out of 44.[320] A 2017 C-Span poll of historians also ranked Bush as the 20th best president out of 43.[321] Richard Rose described Bush as a "guardian" president, and many other historians and political scientists have similarly described Bush as a passive, hands-off president who was "largely content with things as they were".[322] Professor Steven Knott writes that "[g]enerally the Bush presidency is viewed as successful in foreign affairs but a disappointment in domestic affairs."[323]
+Biographer Jon Meacham writes that, after he left office, many Americans viewed Bush as "a gracious and underappreciated man who had many virtues but who had failed to project enough of a distinctive identity and vision to overcome the economic challenges of 1991–92 and to win a second term."[324] Bush himself noted that his legacy was "lost between the glory of Reagan ... and the trials and tribulations of my sons."[325] In the 2010s, Bush was fondly remembered for his willingness to compromise, which contrasted with the intensely partisan era that followed his presidency.[326]
+According to USA Today, the legacy of Bush's presidency was defined by his victory over Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, and for his presiding over the collapse of the USSR and the re-unification of Germany.[327] Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott praise Bush's handling of the USSR, especially how he prodded Gorbachev in terms of releasing control over the satellites and permitting German unification—and especially a united Germany in NATO.[328] Andrew Bacevich judges the Bush administration as “morally obtuse” in the light of its “business-as-usual” attitude towards China after the massacre in Tiananmen Square and its uncritical support of Gorbachev as the Soviet Union disintegrated.[329] David Rothkopf argues:
+In 1990, Time magazine named him the Man of the Year.[331] In 1997, the Houston Intercontinental Airport was renamed as the George Bush Intercontinental Airport.[332] In 1999, the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in his honor.[333] In 2011, Bush, an avid golfer, was inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame.[334] The USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), the tenth and last Nimitz-class supercarrier of the United States Navy, was named for Bush.[335][336] Bush is commemorated on a postage stamp that was issued by the United States Postal Service in 2019.[337]
+The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the tenth U.S. presidential library, was completed in 1997.[338] It contains the presidential and vice presidential papers of Bush and the vice presidential papers of Dan Quayle.[339] The library is located on a 90-acre (36 ha) site on the west campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.[340] Texas A&M University also hosts the Bush School of Government and Public Service, a graduate public policy school.[340]
+Convention
+Primaries
+Convention
+Primaries

en/2176.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,177 @@

+George Herbert Walker Bush[a] (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018) was an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993. A member of the Republican Party, Bush also served in the U.S. House of Representatives, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as Director of Central Intelligence, and as the 43rd vice president.
+Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and attended Phillips Academy before serving in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Yale University and moved to West Texas, where he established a successful oil company. After an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate, he won election to the 7th congressional district of Texas in 1966. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and to the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed him as the Chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China, and in 1976 Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence. Bush ran for president in 1980, but was defeated in the Republican presidential primaries by Ronald Reagan. He was then elected vice president in 1980 and 1984 as Reagan's running mate.
+In the 1988 presidential election, Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, becoming the first incumbent vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency, as he navigated the final years of the Cold War and played a key role in the reunification of Germany. Bush presided over the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in the latter conflict. Though the agreement was not ratified until after he left office, Bush negotiated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a trade bloc consisting of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Domestically, Bush reneged on a 1988 campaign promise by signing a bill that increased taxes and helped reduce the federal budget deficit. He also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and appointed David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Bush lost the 1992 presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton following an economic recession and the decreased emphasis of foreign policy in a post–Cold War political climate.
+After leaving office in 1993, Bush was active in humanitarian activities, often working alongside Clinton, his former opponent. With the victory of his son, George W. Bush, in the 2000 presidential election, the two became the second father–son pair to serve as the nation's president, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Another son, Jeb Bush, unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 Republican primaries. After a long battle with vascular Parkinson's disease, Bush died at his home on November 30, 2018. Historians generally rank Bush as an above average president.
+George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts[2] on June 12, 1924. He was the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy (Walker) Bush.[3] His paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, worked as an executive for a railroad parts company in Columbus, Ohio,[4] and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, led Wall Street investment bank W. A. Harriman & Co.[5] Bush was named after his maternal grandfather, who was known as "Pop", and young Bush was called "Poppy" as a tribute to his namesake.[6] The Bush family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut in 1925, and Prescott took a position with W. A. Harriman & Co. (which later merged into Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) the following year.[7]
+Bush spent most of his childhood in Greenwich, at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine,[b] or at his maternal grandparents' plantation in South Carolina.[9] Because of the family's wealth, Bush was largely unaffected by the Great Depression, a major economic downturn that led to high levels of unemployment for much of the 1930s.[10] He attended Greenwich Country Day School from 1929 to 1937[11] and Phillips Academy, an elite private academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1937 to 1942.[12] While at Phillips Academy, he served as president of the senior class, secretary of the student council, president of the community fund-raising group, a member of the editorial board of the school newspaper, and captain of the varsity baseball and soccer teams.[13]
+On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, marking the start of U.S. participation in World War II. On his 18th birthday, immediately after graduating from Phillips Academy, he enlisted in the United States Navy as a naval aviator.[14] After a period of training, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi on June 9, 1943, becoming one of the youngest aviators in the Navy.[15][c] Beginning in 1944, Bush served in the Pacific theater of World War II, where he flew a Grumman TBF Avenger, a torpedo bomber capable of taking off from aircraft carriers.[20] His squadron was assigned to the USS San Jacinto as a member of Air Group 51, where his lanky physique earned him the nickname "Skin".[21]
+Bush flew his first combat mission in May 1944, bombing Japanese-held Wake Island,[22] and was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on August 1, 1944. During an attack on a Japanese installation in Chichijima, Bush's aircraft successfully attacked several targets, but was downed by enemy fire.[19] Though both of Bush's fellow crew members died, Bush successfully bailed out from the aircraft and was rescued by the USS Finback.[23][d] Several of the aviators shot down during the attack were captured and executed, and their livers were eaten by their captors.[24] Bush's near-death experience shaped him profoundly, leading him to ask, "Why had I been spared and what did God have for me?"[25] He was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his role in the mission.[26]
+Bush returned to San Jacinto in November 1944, participating in operations in the Philippines.[19] In early 1945, he was assigned to a new combat squadron, VT-153, where he trained to take part in an invasion of mainland Japan. On September 2, 1945, before any invasion took place, Japan formally surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[27] Bush was released from active duty that same month, but was not formally discharged from the navy until October 1955, at which point he had reached the rank of lieutenant.[19] By the end of his period of active service, Bush had flown 58 missions, completed 128 carrier landings, and recorded 1228 hours of flight time.[28]
+Bush met Barbara Pierce at a Christmas dance in Greenwich in December 1941,[29] and, after a period of courtship, they became engaged in December 1943.[30] While Bush was on leave from the navy, they married in Rye, New York, on January 6, 1945.[31] The Bushes enjoyed a strong marriage, and Barbara would later be a popular First Lady, seen by many as "a kind of national grandmother".[32][e] The marriage produced six children: George W. (b. 1946), Robin (b. 1949), Jeb (b. 1953), Neil (b. 1955), Marvin (b. 1956), and Doro (b. 1959).[14] Their oldest daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.[35]
+Following the end of World War II, Bush enrolled at Yale University, where he took part in an accelerated program that enabled him to graduate in two and a half years rather than the usual four.[14] He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was elected its president.[36] He also captained the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series as a left-handed first baseman.[37] Like his father, he was a member of the Yale cheerleading squad[38] and was initiated into the Skull and Bones secret society. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in economics and minoring in sociology.[39]
+After graduating from Yale, Bush moved his young family to West Texas. Biographer Jon Meacham writes that Bush's relocation to Texas allowed him to move out of the "daily shadow of his Wall Street father and Grandfather Walker, two dominant figures in the financial world", but would still allow Bush to "call on their connections if he needed to raise capital."[40] His first position in Texas was an oil field equipment salesman[41] for Dresser Industries, which was led by family friend Neil Mallon.[42] While working for Dresser, Bush lived in various places with his family: Odessa, Texas; Ventura, Bakersfield and Compton, California; and Midland, Texas.[43] In 1952, he volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. That same year, his father won election to represent Connecticut in the United States Senate as a member of the Republican Party.[44]
+With support from Mallon and Bush's uncle, George Herbert Walker Jr., Bush and John Overbey launched the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company in 1951.[45] In 1953 he co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas.[46] In 1954, he was named president of the Zapata Offshore Company, a subsidiary which specialized in offshore drilling.[47] Shortly after the subsidiary became independent in 1959, Bush moved the company and his family from Midland to Houston.[48] In Houston, he befriended James Baker, a prominent attorney who later became an important political ally.[49] Bush remained involved with Zapata until the mid-1960s, when he sold his stock in the company for approximately $1 million.[50] In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this allegation.[51]
+By the early 1960s, Bush was widely regarded as an appealing political candidate, and some leading Democrats attempted to convince Bush to become a Democrat. He declined to leave the Republican Party, later citing his belief that the national Democratic Party favored "big, centralized government". The Democratic Party had historically dominated Texas, but Republicans scored their first major victory in the state with John G. Tower's victory in a 1961 special election to the United States Senate. Motivated by Tower's victory, and hoping to prevent the far-right John Birch Society from coming to power, Bush ran for the chairmanship of the Harris County, Texas Republican Party, winning election in February 1963.[52] Like most other Texas Republicans, Bush supported conservative Senator Barry Goldwater over the more centrist Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican Party presidential primaries.[53]
+In 1964, Bush sought to unseat liberal Democrat Ralph W. Yarborough in Texas's U.S. Senate election.[54] Bolstered by superior fundraising, Bush won the Republican primary by defeating former gubernatorial nominee Jack Cox in a run-off election. In the general election, Bush attacked Yarborough's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial and gender discrimination in public institutions and in many privately owned businesses. Bush argued that the act unconstitutionally expanded the powers of the federal government, but he was privately uncomfortable with the racial politics of opposing the act.[55] He lost the election 56 percent to 44 percent, though he did run well ahead of Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee.[54] Despite the loss, the New York Times reported that Bush was "rated by political friend and foe alike as the Republicans' best prospect in Texas because of his attractive personal qualities and the strong campaign he put up for the Senate".[56]
+In 1966, Bush ran for the United States House of Representatives in Texas's 7th congressional district, a newly redistricted seat in the Greater Houston area. Initial polling showed him trailing his Democratic opponent, Harris County District Attorney Frank Briscoe, but he ultimately won the race with 57 percent of the vote.[57] In an effort to woo potential candidates in the South and Southwest, House Republicans secured Bush an appointment to the powerful United States House Committee on Ways and Means, making Bush the first freshman to serve on the committee since 1904.[58] His voting record in the House was generally conservative. He supported the Nixon administration's Vietnam policies, but broke with Republicans on the issue of birth control, which he supported. He also voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, although it was generally unpopular in his district.[59][60] In 1968, Bush joined several other Republicans in issuing the party's Response to the State of the Union address; Bush's part of the address focused on a call for fiscal responsibility.[61]
+Though most other Texas Republicans supported Ronald Reagan in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries, Bush endorsed Richard Nixon, who went on to win the party's nomination. Nixon considered selecting Bush as his running mate in the 1968 presidential election, but he ultimately chose Spiro Agnew instead. Bush won re-election to the House unopposed, while Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election.[62] In 1970, with President Nixon's support, Bush gave up his seat in the House to run for the Senate against Yarborough. Bush easily won the Republican primary, but Yarborough was defeated by the more centrist Lloyd Bentsen in the Democratic primary.[63] Ultimately, Bentsen defeated Bush, taking 53.5 percent of the vote.[64]
+After the 1970 Senate election, Bush accepted a position as a senior adviser to the president, but he convinced Nixon to instead appoint him as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.[65] The position represented Bush's first foray into foreign policy, as well as his first major experiences with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the two major U.S. rivals in the Cold War.[66] During Bush's tenure, the Nixon administration pursued a policy of détente, seeking to ease tensions with both the Soviet Union and China.[67] Bush's ambassadorship was marked by a defeat on the China question, as the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel the Republic of China and replace it with the People's Republic of China in October 1971.[68] In the 1971 crisis in Pakistan, Bush supported an Indian motion at the UN General Assembly to condemn the Pakistani government of Yahya Khan for waging genocide in East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh), referring to the "tradition which we have supported that the human rights question transcended domestic jurisdiction and should be freely debated".[69] Bush's support for India at the UN put him into conflict with Nixon who was supporting Pakistan, partly because Yahya Khan was a useful intermediary in his attempts to reach out to China and partly because the president was fond of Yahya Khan.[70]
+After Nixon won a landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, he appointed Bush as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).[71][72] In that position, he was charged with fundraising, candidate recruitment, and making appearances on behalf of the party in the media.
+When Agnew was being investigated for corruption, Bush assisted, at the request of Nixon and Agnew, in pressuring John Glenn Beall Jr., the U.S. Senator from Maryland to force his brother, George Beall the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, who was supervising the investigation into Agnew.  Attorney Beall ignored the pressure.[73]
+During Bush's tenure at the RNC, the Watergate scandal emerged into public view; the scandal originated from the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee, but also involved later efforts to cover up the break-in by Nixon and other members of the White House.[74] Bush initially defended Nixon steadfastly, but as Nixon's complicity became clear he focused more on defending the Republican Party.[59]
+Following the resignation of Vice President Agnew in 1973 for a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Bush was considered for the position of vice president, but the appointment instead went to Gerald Ford.[75] After the public release of an audio recording that confirmed that Nixon had plotted to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, Bush joined other party leaders in urging Nixon to resign.[76] When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Bush noted in his diary that "There was an aura of sadness, like somebody died... The [resignation] speech was vintage Nixon—a kick or two at the press—enormous strains. One couldn't help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame... [President Gerald Ford's swearing-in offered] indeed a new spirit, a new lift."[77]
+Upon his ascension to the presidency, Ford strongly considered Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Nelson Rockefeller for the vacant position of vice president. Ford ultimately chose Nelson Rockefeller, partly because of the publication of a news report claiming that Bush's 1970 campaign had benefited from a secret fund set up by Nixon; Bush was later cleared of any suspicion by a special prosecutor.[78] Bush accepted appointment as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, making the him the de facto ambassador to China.[79] According to biographer Jon Meacham, Bush's time in China convinced him that American engagement abroad was needed to ensure global stability, and that the United States "needed to be visible but not pushy, muscular but not domineering."[80]
+In January 1976, Ford brought Bush back to Washington to become the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), placing him in charge of the CIA.[81] In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, the CIA's reputation had been damaged for its role in various covert operations, and Bush was tasked with restoring the agency's morale and public reputation.[82][f] During Bush's year in charge of the CIA, the U.S. national security apparatus actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.[83][84] Meanwhile, Ford decided to drop Rockefeller from the ticket for the 1976 presidential election; he considered Bush as his running mate, but ultimately chose Bob Dole.[85] In his capacity as DCI, Bush gave national security briefings to Jimmy Carter both as a presidential candidate and as president-elect.[86]
+Bush's tenure at the CIA ended after Carter narrowly defeated Ford in the 1976 presidential election. Out of public office for the first time since the 1960s, Bush became chairman on the Executive Committee of the First International Bank in Houston.[87] He also spent a year as a part-time professor of Administrative Science at Rice University's Jones School of Business,[88] continued his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, and joined the Trilateral Commission. Meanwhile, he began to lay the groundwork for his candidacy in the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries.[89] In the 1980 Republican primary campaign, Bush would face Ronald Reagan, who was widely regarded as the front-runner, as well as other contenders like Senator Bob Dole, Senator Howard Baker, Texas Governor John Connally, Congressman Phil Crane, and Congressman John B. Anderson.[90]
+Bush's campaign cast him as a youthful, "thinking man's candidate" who would emulate the pragmatic conservatism of President Eisenhower.[91] In the midst of the Soviet–Afghan War, which brought an end to a period of détente, and the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 Americans were taken hostage, the campaign highlighted Bush's foreign policy experience.[92] At the outset of the race, Bush focused heavily on winning the January 21 Iowa caucuses, making 31 visits to the state.[93] Ultimately, he won a close victory Iowa with 31.5% to Reagan's 29.4%. After the win, Bush stated that his campaign was full of momentum, or "the Big Mo",[94] and Reagan reorganized his campaign.[95] Partly in response to the Bush campaign's frequent questioning of Reagan's age (Reagan turned 69 in 1980), the Reagan campaign stepped up attacks on Bush, painting him as an elitist who was not truly committed to conservatism.[96] Prior to the New Hampshire primary, Bush and Reagan agreed to a two-person debate, organized by The Nashua Telegraph but paid for by the Reagan campaign.[95]
+Days before the debate, Reagan announced that he would invite four other candidates to the debate; Bush, who had hoped that the one-on-one debate would allow him to emerge as the main alternative to Reagan in the primaries, refused to debate the other candidate. All six candidates took the stage, but Bush refused to speak in the presence of the other candidates. Ultimately, the other four candidates left the stage and the debate continued, but Bush's refusal to debate anyone other than Reagan badly damaged his campaign in New Hampshire.[97] He ended up decisively losing New Hampshire's primary to Reagan, winning just 23 percent of the vote.[95] Bush revitalized his campaign with a victory in Massachusetts, but lost the next several primaries. As Reagan built up a commanding delegate lead, Bush refused to end his campaign, but the other candidates dropped out of the race.[98] Criticizing his more conservative rival's policy proposals, Bush famously labeled Reagan's supply side-influenced plans for massive tax cuts as "voodoo economics".[99] Though he favored lower taxes, Bush feared that dramatic reductions in taxation would lead to deficits and, in turn, cause inflation.[100]
+After Reagan clinched a majority of delegates in late May, Bush reluctantly dropped out of the race.[101] At the 1980 Republican National Convention, Reagan made the last-minute decision to select Bush as his vice presidential nominee after negotiations with Ford regarding a Reagan-Ford ticket collapsed.[102] Though Reagan had resented many of the Bush campaign's attacks during the primary campaign, and several conservative leaders had actively opposed Bush's nomination, Reagan ultimately decided that Bush's popularity with moderate Republicans made him the best and safest pick.[103] Bush, who had believed his political career might be over following the primaries, eagerly accepted the position and threw himself into campaigning for the Reagan-Bush ticket.[104] The 1980 general election campaign between Reagan and Carter was conducted amid a multitude of domestic concerns and the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, and Reagan sought to focus the race on Carter's handling of the economy.[105] Though the race was widely regarded as a close contest for most of the campaign, Reagan ultimately won over the large majority of undecided voters.[106] Reagan took 50.7 percent of the popular vote and 489 of the 538 electoral votes, while Carter won 41% of the popular vote and John Anderson, running as an independent candidate, won 6.6% of the popular vote.[107]
+As vice president, Bush generally maintained a low profile, recognizing the constitutional limits of the office; he avoided decision-making or criticizing Reagan in any way. This approach helped him earn Reagan's trust, easing tensions left over from their earlier rivalry.[95] Bush also generally enjoyed a good relationship with Reagan staffers, including his close friend Jim Baker, who served as Reagan's initial chief of staff.[108] His understanding of the vice presidency was heavily influenced by Vice President Walter Mondale, who enjoyed a strong relationship with President Carter in part because of his ability to avoid confrontations with senior staff and Cabinet members, and by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's difficult relationship with some members of the White House staff during the Ford administration.[109] The Bushes attended a large number of public and ceremonial events in their positions, including many state funerals, which became a common joke for comedians. As the President of the Senate, Bush also stayed in contact with members of Congress and kept the president informed on occurrences on Capitol Hill.[95]
+On March 30, 1981, while Bush was in Texas, Reagan was shot and seriously wounded by John Hinckley Jr. Bush immediately flew back from Washington D.C.; when his plane landed, his aides advised him to proceed directly to the White House by helicopter in order to show that the government was still functioning.[95] Bush rejected the idea, as he feared that such a dramatic scene risked giving the impression that he sought to usurp Reagan's powers and prerogatives.[110] During Reagan's short period of incapacity, Bush presided over Cabinet meetings, met with congressional leaders and foreign leaders, and briefed reporters, but he consistently rejected the possibility of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment.[111] Bush's handling of the attempted assassination and its aftermath made a positive impression on Reagan, who recovered and returned to work within two weeks of the shooting. From then on, the two men would have regular Thursday lunches in the Oval Office.[112]
+Bush was assigned by Reagan to chair two special task forces, one on deregulation and one on international drug smuggling. Both were popular issues with conservatives, and Bush, largely a moderate, began courting them through his work. The deregulation task force reviewed hundreds of rules, making specific recommendations on which ones to amend or revise, in order to curb the size of the federal government.[95] The Reagan administration's deregulation push had a strong impact on broadcasting, finance, resource extraction, and other economic activities, and the administration eliminated numerous government positions.[113] Bush also oversaw the administration's national security crisis management organization, which had traditionally been the responsibility of the National Security Advisor.[114] In 1983, Bush toured Western Europe as part of the Reagan administration's ultimately successful efforts to convince skeptical NATO allies to support the deployment of Pershing II missiles.[115]
+Reagan's approval ratings fell after his first year in office, but they bounced back when the United States began to emerge from recession in 1983.[116] Former Vice President Walter Mondale was nominated by the Democratic Party in the 1984 presidential election. Down in the polls, Mondale selected Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in hopes of galvanizing support for his campaign, thus making Ferraro the first female major party vice presidential nominee in U.S. history.[117] She and Bush squared off in a single televised vice presidential debate.[95] Public opinion polling consistently showed a Reagan lead in the 1984 campaign, and Mondale was unable to shake up the race.[118] In the end, Reagan won re-election, winning 49 of 50 states and receiving 59% of the popular vote to Mondale's 41%.[119]
+Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985; less ideologically rigid than his predecessors, Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union urgently needed economic and political reforms.[120] At the 1987 Washington Summit, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which committed both signatories to the total abolition of their respective short-range and medium-range missile stockpiles.[121] The treaty marked the beginning of a new era of trade, openness, and cooperation between the two powers.[122] Though President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz took the lead in these negotiations, Bush sat in on many meetings and promised Gorbachev that he would seek to continue improving Soviet-U.S. relations if he succeeded Reagan.[123] On July 13, 1985, Bush became the first vice president to serve as acting president when Reagan underwent surgery to remove polyps from his colon; Bush served as the acting president for approximately eight hours.[124]
+In 1986, the Reagan administration was shaken by a scandal when it was revealed that administration officials had secretly arranged weapon sales to Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. The officials had used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, which was a direct violation of law.[95] When news of affair broke to the media, Bush, like Reagan, stated that he had been "out of the loop" and unaware of the diversion of funds, although this has assertion has since been challenged.[125] Biographer Jon Meacham writes that "no evidence was ever produced proving Bush was aware of the diversion to the contras," but he criticizes Bush's "out of the loop" characterization, writing that the "record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages".[126] The Iran–Contra scandal, as it became known, did serious damage to the Reagan presidency, raising questions about Reagan's competency.[127] Congress established the Tower Commission to investigate the scandal, and, at Reagan's request, a panel of federal judges appointed Lawrence Walsh as a special prosecutor charged with investigating the Iran–Contra scandal.[128] The investigations continued after Reagan left office and, though Bush was never charged with a crime, the Iran–Contra scandal would remain a political liability for him.[129]
+Bush began planning for a presidential run after the 1984 election, and he officially entered the 1988 Republican Party presidential primaries in October 1987.[95] He put together a campaign led by Reagan staffer Lee Atwater, and which also included his son, George W. Bush, and media consultant Roger Ailes.[130] Though he had moved to the right during his time as vice president, endorsing a Human Life Amendment and repudiating his earlier comments on "voodoo economics," Bush still faced opposition from many conservatives in the Republican Party.[131] His major rivals for the Republican nomination were Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, and Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.[132] Reagan did not publicly endorse any candidate, but he privately expressed support for Bush.[133]
+Though considered the early front-runner for the nomination, Bush came in third in the Iowa caucus, behind Dole and Robertson.[134] Much as Reagan had done in 1980, Bush reorganized his staff and concentrated on the New Hampshire primary.[95] With help from Governor John H. Sununu and an effective campaign attacking Dole for raising taxes, Bush overcame an initial polling deficit and won New Hampshire with 39 percent of the vote.[135] After Bush won South Carolina and 16 of the 17 states holding a primary on Super Tuesday, his competitors dropped out of the race.[136]
+Bush, occasionally criticized for his lack of eloquence when compared to Reagan, delivered a well-received speech at the Republican convention. Known as the "thousand points of light" speech, it described Bush's vision of America: he endorsed the Pledge of Allegiance, prayer in schools, capital punishment, and gun rights.[137] Bush also pledged that he would not raise taxes, stating: "Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And all I can say to them is: read my lips. No new taxes."[138] Bush selected little-known Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. Though Quayle had compiled an unremarkable record in Congress, he was popular among many conservatives, and the campaign hoped that Quayle's youth would appeal to younger voters.[139]
+Meanwhile, the Democratic Party nominated Governor Michael Dukakis, who was known for presiding over an economic turnaround in Massachusetts.[140] Leading in the general election polls against Bush, Dukakis ran an ineffective, low-risk campaign.[141] The Bush campaign attacked Dukakis as an unpatriotic liberal extremist and seized on Dukakis's pardon of Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who had raped a woman while on a prison furlough. The Bush campaign charged that Dukakis presided over a "revolving door" that allowed dangerous convicted felons to leave prison.[142] Dukakis damaged his own campaign with a widely mocked ride in an M1 Abrams tank and a poor performance at the second presidential debate.[143] Bush also attacked Dukakis for opposing a law that would require all students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[137] The election is widely considered to have had a high level of negative campaigning, though political scientist John Geer has argued that the share of negative ads was in line with previous presidential elections.[144]
+Bush defeated Dukakis by a margin of 426 to 111 in the Electoral College, and he took 53.4 percent of the national popular vote.[145] Bush ran well in all the major regions of the country, but especially in the South.[146] He became the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, the first person to succeed a president from his own party via election since Herbert Hoover in 1929.[95][g] In the concurrent congressional elections, Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.[148]
+Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 1989, succeeding Ronald Reagan. In his inaugural address, Bush said:
+I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken.[149]
+Bush's first major appointment was that of James Baker as Secretary of State.[150] Leadership of the Department of Defense went to Dick Cheney, who had had previously served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff and would later serve as vice president under George W. Bush.[151] Jack Kemp joined the administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, while Elizabeth Dole, the wife of Bob Dole and a former Secretary of Transportation, became the Secretary of Labor under Bush.[152] Bush retained several Reagan officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos.[153] New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, a strong supporter of Bush during the 1988 campaign, became chief of staff.[150] Brent Scowcroft was appointed as the National Security Advisor, a role he had also held under Ford.[154]
+During the first year of his tenure, Bush pursued what Soviets referred to as the pauza, a break in Reagan's détente policies.[155] Bush and his advisers were initially divided on Gorbachev; some administration officials saw him as a democratic reformer, but others suspected him of trying to make the minimum changes necessary to restore the Soviet Union to a competitive position with the United States.[156] In 1989, Communist governments fell in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the governments of Bulgaria and Romania instituted major reforms, and the government of East Germany opened the Berlin Wall, which was subsequently demolished by Berliners.[157] Many Soviet leaders urged Gorbachev to crush the dissidents in Eastern Europe, but Gorbachev declined to send in the Soviet military, effectively abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine.[158] The U.S. was not directly involved in these upheavals, but the Bush administration avoided the appearance of gloating over the demise of the Eastern Bloc to avoid undermining further democratic reforms.[157] Bush also helped convince Polish leaders to allow democratic elections and became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hungary.[159]
+By mid-1989, as unrest blanketed Eastern Europe, Bush requested a meeting with Gorbachev, and the two agreed to hold the December 1989 Malta Summit.[158] Though many on the right remained wary of Gorbachev, Bush came away from the Malta Summit with the belief that Gorbachev would negotiate in good faith.[160] For the remainder of his term, Bush sought cooperative relations with Gorbachev, believing that the Soviet leader was the key to peacefully ending the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.[161] The key issue at the Malta Summit was the potential reunification of Germany.[162] While Britain and France were wary of a re-unified Germany, Bush joined West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in pushing for German reunification.[163] Bush believed that a reunified Germany would serve U.S. interests, but he also saw reunification as providing a final symbolic end to World War II.[164] After extensive negotiations, Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to be a part of NATO, and Germany officially reunified in October 1990.[165]
+Though Gorbachev acquiesced to the democratization of Soviet satellite states, he suppressed nationalist movements within the Soviet Union itself.[166] A crisis in Lithuania left Bush in a difficult position, as he needed Gorbachev's cooperation in the reunification of Germany and feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union could leave nuclear arms in dangerous hands. The Bush administration mildly protested Gorbachev's suppression of Lithuania's independence movement, but took no action to directly intervene.[167] Bush warned independence movements of the disorder that could come with secession from the Soviet Union; in a 1991 address that critics labeled the "Chicken Kiev speech", he cautioned against "suicidal nationalism".[168] In July 1991, Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) treaty, in which both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent.[169]
+In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government.[170] Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until December 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.[171] Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, and of those states, Russia was the largest and most populous. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership".[172] In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.[173] The collapse of the Soviet Union prompted reflections on the future of the world following the end of the Cold War; one political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, speculated that humanity had reached the "end of history" in that liberal, capitalist democracy had permanently triumphed over Communism and fascism.[174] Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments led to post-Soviet conflicts in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa that would continue long after Bush left office.[175]
+During the 1980s, the U.S. had provided aid to Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, an anti-Communist dictator who engaged in drug trafficking. In May 1989, Noriega annulled the results of a democratic presidential election in which Guillermo Endara had been elected. Bush objected to the annulment of the election and worried about the status of the Panama Canal with Noriega still in office.[176] Bush dispatched 2,000 soldiers to the country, where they began conducting regular military exercises in violation of prior treaties.[177] After a U.S. serviceman was shot by Panamanian forces in December 1989, Bush ordered the United States invasion of Panama, known as "Operation Just Cause". The invasion was the first large-scale American military operation in more than 40 years that was not related to the Cold War. American forces quickly took control of the Panama Canal Zone and Panama City. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was quickly transported to a prison in the United States. Twenty-three Americans died in the operation, while another 394 were wounded. Noriega was convicted and imprisoned on racketeering and drug trafficking charges in April 1992.[176] Historian Stewart Brewer argues that the invasion "represented a new era in American foreign policy" because Bush did not justify the invasion under the Monroe Doctrine or the threat of Communism, but rather on the grounds that it was in the best interests of the United States.[178]
+Faced with massive debts and low oil prices in the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein decided to conquer the country of Kuwait, a small, oil-rich country situated on Iraq's southern border.[179] After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush imposed economic sanctions on Iraq and assembled a multi-national coalition opposed to the invasion.[180] The administration feared that a failure to respond to the invasion would embolden Hussein to attack Saudi Arabia or Israel, and wanted to discourage other countries from similar aggression.[181] Bush also wanted to ensure continued access to oil, as Iraq and Kuwait collectively accounted for 20 percent of the world's oil production, and Saudi Arabia produced another 26 percent of the world's oil supply.[182]
+At Bush's insistence, in November 1990, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not withdrawal from Kuwait by January 15, 1991.[183] Gorbachev's support, as well as China's abstention, helped ensure passage of the UN resolution.[184] Bush convinced Britain, France, and other nations to commit soldiers to an operation against Iraq, and he won important financial backing from Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.[185] In January 1991, Bush asked Congress to approve a joint resolution authorizing a war against Iraq.[186] Bush believed that the UN resolution had already provided him with the necessary authorization to launch a military operation against Iraq, but he wanted to show that the nation was united behind a military action.[187] Despite the opposition of a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991.[186]
+After the January 15 deadline passed without an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces began a conducted a bombing campaign that devastated Iraq's power grid and communications network, and resulted in the desertion of about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers. In retaliation, Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but most of the missiles did little damage. On February 23, coalition forces began a ground invasion into Kuwait, evicting Iraqi forces by the end of February 27. About 300 Americans, as well as approximately 65 soldiers from other coalition nations, died during the military action.[188] A cease fire was arranged on March 3, and the UN passed a resolution establishing a peacekeeping force in a demilitarized zone between Kuwait and Iraq.[189] A March 1991 Gallup poll showed that Bush had an approval rating of 89 percent, the highest presidential approval rating in the history of Gallup polling.[190] After 1991, the UN maintained economic sanctions against Iraq, and the United Nations Special Commission was assigned to ensure that Iraq did not revive its weapons of mass destruction program.[191]
+In 1987, the U.S. and Canada had reached a free trade agreement that eliminated many tariffs between the two countries. President Reagan had intended it as the first step towards a larger trade agreement to eliminate most tariffs among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.[192] The Bush administration, along with the Progressive Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, spearheaded the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. In addition to lowering tariffs, the proposed treaty would affected patents, copyrights, and trademarks.[193] In 1991, Bush sought fast track authority, which grants the president the power to submit an international trade agreement to Congress without the possibility of amendment. Despite congressional opposition led by House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, both houses of Congress voted to grant Bush fast track authority. NAFTA was signed in December 1992, after Bush lost re-election,[194] but President Clinton won ratification of NAFTA in 1993.[195] NAFTA remains controversial for its impact on wages, jobs, and overall economic growth.[196]
+The U.S. economy had generally performed well since emerging from recession in late 1982, but it slipped into a mild recession in 1990. The unemployment rate rose from 5.9 percent in 1989 to a high of 7.8 percent in mid-1991.[197][198] Large federal deficits, spawned during the Reagan years, rose from $152.1 billion in 1989[199] to $220 billion for 1990;[200] the $220 billion deficit represented a threefold increase since 1980.[201] As the public became increasingly concerned about the economy and other domestic affairs, Bush's well-received handling of foreign affairs became less of an issue for most voters.[202] Bush's top domestic priority was to bring an end to federal budget deficits, which he saw as a liability for the country's long-term economic health and standing in the world.[203] As he was opposed to major defense spending cuts[204] and had pledged to not raise taxes, the president had major difficulties in balancing the budget.[205]
+Bush and congressional leaders agreed to avoid major changes to the budget for fiscal year 1990, which began in October 1989. However, both sides knew that spending cuts or new taxes would be necessary in the following year's budget in order to avoid the draconian automatic domestic spending cuts required by the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1987.[206] Bush and other leaders also wanted to cut deficits because Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan refused to lower interest rates, and thus stimulate economic growth, unless the federal budget deficit was reduced.[207] In a statement released in late June 1990, Bush said that he would be open to a deficit reduction program which included spending cuts, incentives for economic growth, budget process reform, as well as tax increases.[208] To fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party, Bush's statement represented a betrayal, and they heavily criticized him for compromising so early in the negotiations.[209]
+In September 1990, Bush and Congressional Democrats announced a compromise to cut funding for mandatory and discretionary programs while also raising revenue, partly through a higher gas tax. The compromise additionally included a "pay as you go" provision that required that new programs be paid for at the time of implementation.[210] House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich led the conservative opposition to the bill, strongly opposing any form of tax increase.[211] Some liberals also criticized the budget cuts in the compromise, and in October, the House rejected the deal, resulting in a brief government shutdown. Without the strong backing of the Republican Party, Bush agreed to another compromise bill, this one more favorable to Democrats. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA-90), enacted on October 27, 1990, dropped much of the gasoline tax increase in favor of higher income taxes on top earners. It included cuts to domestic spending, but the cuts were not as deep as those that had been proposed in the original compromise. Bush's decision to sign the bill damaged his standing with conservatives and the general public, but it also laid the groundwork for the budget surpluses of the late 1990s.[212]
+-Bush's remarks at the signing ceremony for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990[213]
+The disabled had not received legal protections under the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many faced discrimination and segregation by the time Bush took office. In 1988, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and Tony Coelho had introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act, which barred employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities. The bill had passed the Senate but not the House, and it was reintroduced in 1989. Though some conservatives opposed the bill due to its costs and potential burdens on businesses, Bush strongly supported it, partly because his son, Neil, had struggled with dyslexia. After the bill passed both houses of Congress, Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 into law in July 1990.[214] The act required employers and public accommodations to make "reasonable accommodations" for the disabled, while providing an exception when such accommodations imposed an "undue hardship".[215]
+Senator Ted Kennedy later led the congressional passage of a separate civil rights bill designed to facilitate launching employment discrimination lawsuits.[216] In vetoing the bill, Bush argued that it would lead to racial quotas in hiring.[217][218] In November 1991, Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which was largely similar to the bill he had vetoed in the previous year.[216]
+In August 1990, Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded program dedicated to assisting persons living with HIV/AIDS.[219] Throughout his presidency, the AIDS epidemic grew dramatically in the U.S. and around the world, and Bush often found himself at odds with AIDS activist groups who criticized him for not placing a high priority on HIV/AIDS research and funding. Frustrated by the administration's lack of urgency on the issue, ACT UP, dumped the ashes of HIV/AIDS victims on the White House lawn during a viewing of the AIDS Quilt in 1992.[220] By that time, HIV had become the leading cause of death in the U.S. for men aged 25–44.[221]
+In June 1989, the Bush administration proposed a bill to amend the Clean Air Act. Working with Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, the administration won passage of the amendments over the opposition of business-aligned members of Congress who feared the impact of tougher regulations.[222] The legislation sought to curb acid rain and smog by requiring decreased emissions of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide,[223] and was the first major update to the Clean Air Act since 1977.[224] Bush also signed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. However, the League of Conservation Voters criticized some of Bush's other environmental actions, including his opposition to stricter auto-mileage standards.[225]
+President Bush devoted attention to voluntary service as a means of solving some of America's most serious social problems. He often used the "thousand points of light" theme to describe the power of citizens to solve community problems. In his 1989 inaugural address, President Bush said, "I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good."[226] During his presidency, Bush honored numerous volunteers with the Daily Point of Light Award, a tradition that was continued by his presidential successors.[227] In 1990, the Points of Light Foundation was created as a nonprofit organization in Washington to promote this spirit of volunteerism.[228] In 2007, the Points of Light Foundation merged with the Hands On Network to create a new organization, Points of Light.[229]
+Bush appointed two justices to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1990, Bush appointed a largely unknown state appellate judge, David Souter, to replace liberal icon William Brennan.[230] Souter was easily confirmed and served until 2009, but joined the liberal bloc of the court, disappointing Bush.[230] In 1991, Bush nominated conservative federal judge Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall, a long-time liberal stalwart. Thomas, the former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), faced heavy opposition in the Senate, as well as from pro-choice groups and the NAACP. His nomination faced another difficulty when Anita Hill accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her during his time as the chair of EEOC. Thomas won confirmation in a narrow 52–48 vote; 43 Republicans and 9 Democrats voted to confirm Thomas's nomination, while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against confirmation.[231] Thomas became one of the most conservative justices of his era.[232] In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 42 judges to the United States courts of appeals, and 148 judges to the United States district courts. Among these appointments were future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as well as Vaughn R. Walker, who was later revealed to be the earliest known gay federal judge.[233]
+Bush's education platform consisted mainly of offering federal support for a variety of innovations, such as open enrollment, incentive pay for outstanding teachers, and rewards for schools that improve performance with underprivileged children.[234] Though Bush did not pass a major educational reform package during his presidency, his ideas influenced later reform efforts, including Goals 2000 and the No Child Left Behind Act.[235] Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990,[236] which led to a 40 percent increase in legal immigration to the United States.[237] The act more than doubled the number of visas given to immigrants on the basis of job skills.[238] In the wake of the savings and loan crisis, Bush proposed a $50 billion package to rescue the savings and loans industry, and also proposed the creation of the Office of Thrift Supervision to regulate the industry. Congress passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, which incorporated most of Bush's proposals.[239]
+Bush was widely seen as a "pragmatic caretaker" president who lacked a unified and compelling long-term theme in his efforts.[240][241][242] Indeed, Bush's sound bite where he refers to the issue of overarching purpose as "the vision thing" has become a metonym applied to other political figures accused of similar difficulties.[243][244][245][246][247][248] His ability to gain broad international support for the Gulf War and the war's result were seen as both a diplomatic and military triumph,[249] rousing bipartisan approval,[250] though his decision to withdraw without removing Saddam Hussein left mixed feelings, and attention returned to the domestic front and a souring economy.[251] A New York Times article mistakenly depicted Bush as being surprised to see a supermarket barcode reader;[252][253] the report of his reaction exacerbated the notion that he was "out of touch".[252] Amid the early 1990s recession, his image shifted from "conquering hero" to "politician befuddled by economic matters".[254]
+Bush announced his reelection bid in early 1992; with a coalition victory in the Persian Gulf War and high approval ratings, Bush's reelection initially looked likely.[255] As a result, many leading Democrats, including Mario Cuomo, Dick Gephardt, and Al Gore, declined to seek their party's presidential nomination.[256] However, Bush's tax increase had angered many conservatives, who believed that Bush had strayed from the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan.[257] He faced a challenge from conservative political columnist Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primaries.[258] Bush fended off Buchanan's challenge and won his party's nomination at the 1992 Republican National Convention, but the convention adopted a socially conservative platform strongly influenced by the Christian right.[259]
+Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. A moderate who was affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Clinton favored welfare reform, deficit reduction, and a tax cut for the middle class.[260] In early 1992, the race took an unexpected twist when Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot launched a third party bid, claiming that neither Republicans nor Democrats could eliminate the deficit and make government more efficient. His message appealed to voters across the political spectrum disappointed with both parties' perceived fiscal irresponsibility.[261] Perot also attacked NAFTA, which he claimed would lead to major job losses.[262] National polling taken in mid-1992 showed Perot in the lead, but Clinton experienced a surge through effective campaigning and the selection of Senator Al Gore, a popular and relatively young Southerner, as his running mate.[263]
+Clinton won the election, taking 43 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes, while Bush won 37.5 percent of the popular vote and 168 electoral votes.[264] Perot won 19% of the popular vote, one of the highest totals for a third party candidate in U.S. history, drawing equally from both major candidates, according to exit polls.[265] Clinton performed well in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast, while also waging the strongest Democratic campaign in the South since the 1976 election.[266] Several factors were important in Bush's defeat. The ailing economy which arose from recession may have been the main factor in Bush's loss, as 7 in 10 voters said on election day that the economy was either "not so good" or "poor".[267][268] On the eve of the 1992 election, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8%, which was the highest it had been since 1984.[269] The president was also damaged by his alienation of many conservatives in his party.[270] Bush blamed Perot in part for his defeat, though exit polls showed that Perot drew his voters about equally from Clinton and Bush.[271]
+Despite his defeat, Bush left office with a 56 percent job approval rating in January 1993.[272] Like many of his predecessors, Bush issued a series of pardons during his last days in office. In December 1992, he granted executive clemency to six former senior government officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, most prominently former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.[273] The pardons effectively brought an end to special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal.[274]
+After leaving office, Bush and his wife built a retirement house in the community of West Oaks, Houston.[275] He established a presidential office within the Park Laureate Building on Memorial Drive in Houston.[276] He also frequently spent time at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, took annual cruises in Greece, went on fishing trips in Florida, and visited the Bohemian Club in Northern California. He declined to serve on corporate boards, but delivered numerous paid speeches and served as an adviser to The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.[277] He never published his memoirs, but he and Brent Scowcroft co-wrote A World Transformed, a 1999 work on foreign policy. Portions of his letters and his diary were later published as The China Diary of George H. W. Bush and All The Best, George Bush.[278]
+During a 1993 visit to Kuwait, Bush was targeted in an assassination plot directed by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. President Clinton retaliated when he ordered the firing of 23 cruise missiles at Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad.[279] Bush did not publicly comment on the assassination attempt or the missile strike, but privately spoke with Clinton shortly before the strike took place.[280] In the 1994 gubernatorial elections, his sons George W. and Jeb concurrently ran for Governor of Texas and Governor of Florida. Concerning their political careers, he advised them both that "[a]t some point both of you may want to say 'Well, I don't agree with my Dad on that point' or 'Frankly I think Dad was wrong on that.' Do it. Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves".[281] George W. won his race against Ann Richards while Jeb lost to Lawton Chiles. After the results came in, the elder Bush told ABC, "I have very mixed emotions. Proud father, is the way I would sum it all up."[282] Jeb would again run for governor of Florida in 1998 and win at the same time that his brother George W. won re-election in Texas. It marked the second time in United States history that a pair of brothers served simultaneously as governors.[283]
+Bush supported his son's candidacy in the 2000 presidential election, but did not actively campaign in the election and did not deliver a speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention.[284] George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the 2000 election and was re-elected in 2004. Bush and his son thus became the second father–son pair to each serve as President of the United States, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.[285] Through previous administrations, the elder Bush had ubiquitously been known as "George Bush" or "President Bush", but following his son's election the need to distinguish between them has made retronymic forms such as "George H. W. Bush" and "George Bush Sr." and colloquialisms such as "Bush 41" and "Bush the Elder" more common.[286] Bush advised his son on some personnel choices, approving of the selection of Dick Cheney as running mate and the retention of George Tenet as CIA Director. However, he was not consulted on all appointments, including that of his old rival, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense.[287] Though he avoided giving unsolicited advice to his son, Bush and his son also discussed some matters of policy, especially regarding national security issues.[288]
+In his retirement, Bush generally avoided publicly expressing his opinion on political issues, instead using the public spotlight to support various charities.[289] Despite earlier political differences with Bill Clinton, the two former presidents eventually became friends.[290] They appeared together in television ads, encouraging aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.[291]
+Bush supported Republican John McCain in the 2008 presidential election,[292] and Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election,[293] but both were defeated by Democrat Barack Obama. In 2011, Obama awarded Bush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.[294]
+Bush supported his son Jeb's bid in the 2016 presidential election.[295] Jeb Bush's campaign struggled however, and he withdrew from the race during the primaries. Neither George H.W. nor George W. Bush endorsed the eventual Republican nominee, Donald Trump;[296] all three Bushes emerged as frequent critics of Trump's policies and speaking style, while Trump frequently criticized George W. Bush's presidency. George H. W. Bush later said that he voted for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the general election.[297] After the election, Bush wrote a letter to president-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 to inform him that because of his poor health, he would not be able to attend Trump's inauguration on January 20; he gave him his best wishes.[298]
+In August 2017, after the violence at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, both Presidents Bush released a joint statement saying, "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms," the statement from presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush reads. "As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights."[299][300]
+On April 17, 2018, Bush's wife Former First Lady Barbara Bush died at the age of 92,[301] at her home in Houston, Texas. Her funeral was held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston four days later.[302][303] Bush along with former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush (son), Bill Clinton and fellow First Ladies Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush (daughter-in-law) and Hillary Clinton were representatives who attended the funeral and who also took a photo together after the service as a sign of unity which went viral online.[304][305]
+On November 1, Bush went to the polls to vote early in the midterm elections. This would be his final public appearance.[306]
+George H. W. Bush died on November 30, 2018, aged 94 years, 171 days,[307] at his home in Houston.[308] At the time of his death he was the longest-lived U.S. president,[309] a distinction now held by Jimmy Carter.[310] He was also the third-oldest vice president.[h] Bush lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from December 3 through December 5; he was the 12th U.S. president to be accorded this honor.[312][313] Then, on December 5, Bush's casket was transferred from the Capitol rotunda to Washington National Cathedral where a state funeral was held.[314] After the funeral, Bush's body was transported to George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he was buried next to his wife Barbara and daughter Robin.[315] At the funeral, former president George W. Bush eulogized his father saying,
+"He looked for the good in each person, and he usually found it."[314]
+In 1991, The New York Times revealed that Bush was suffering from Graves' disease, a non-contagious thyroid condition that his wife Barbara also suffered from.[316] Later in life, Bush suffered from vascular parkinsonism, a form of Parkinson's disease which forced him to use a motorized scooter or wheelchair.[317]
+Bush was raised in the Episcopal Church, though by the end of his life his apparent religious beliefs are considered to have more in line with Evangelical Christian doctrine and practices.[318] He cited various moments in his life deepening of his faith, including his escape from Japanese forces in 1944, and the death of his three-year-old daughter Robin in 1953.[319] His faith was reflected in his Thousand Points of Light speech, his support for prayer in schools, and his support for the pro-life movement (following his election as vice president).[318][319]
+Polls of historians and political scientists have ranked Bush in the top half of presidents. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association's Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked Bush as the 17th best president out of 44.[320] A 2017 C-Span poll of historians also ranked Bush as the 20th best president out of 43.[321] Richard Rose described Bush as a "guardian" president, and many other historians and political scientists have similarly described Bush as a passive, hands-off president who was "largely content with things as they were".[322] Professor Steven Knott writes that "[g]enerally the Bush presidency is viewed as successful in foreign affairs but a disappointment in domestic affairs."[323]
+Biographer Jon Meacham writes that, after he left office, many Americans viewed Bush as "a gracious and underappreciated man who had many virtues but who had failed to project enough of a distinctive identity and vision to overcome the economic challenges of 1991–92 and to win a second term."[324] Bush himself noted that his legacy was "lost between the glory of Reagan ... and the trials and tribulations of my sons."[325] In the 2010s, Bush was fondly remembered for his willingness to compromise, which contrasted with the intensely partisan era that followed his presidency.[326]
+According to USA Today, the legacy of Bush's presidency was defined by his victory over Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, and for his presiding over the collapse of the USSR and the re-unification of Germany.[327] Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott praise Bush's handling of the USSR, especially how he prodded Gorbachev in terms of releasing control over the satellites and permitting German unification—and especially a united Germany in NATO.[328] Andrew Bacevich judges the Bush administration as “morally obtuse” in the light of its “business-as-usual” attitude towards China after the massacre in Tiananmen Square and its uncritical support of Gorbachev as the Soviet Union disintegrated.[329] David Rothkopf argues:
+In 1990, Time magazine named him the Man of the Year.[331] In 1997, the Houston Intercontinental Airport was renamed as the George Bush Intercontinental Airport.[332] In 1999, the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in his honor.[333] In 2011, Bush, an avid golfer, was inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame.[334] The USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), the tenth and last Nimitz-class supercarrier of the United States Navy, was named for Bush.[335][336] Bush is commemorated on a postage stamp that was issued by the United States Postal Service in 2019.[337]
+The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the tenth U.S. presidential library, was completed in 1997.[338] It contains the presidential and vice presidential papers of Bush and the vice presidential papers of Dan Quayle.[339] The library is located on a 90-acre (36 ha) site on the west campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.[340] Texas A&M University also hosts the Bush School of Government and Public Service, a graduate public policy school.[340]
+Convention
+Primaries
+Convention
+Primaries

en/2177.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,177 @@

+George Herbert Walker Bush[a] (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018) was an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993. A member of the Republican Party, Bush also served in the U.S. House of Representatives, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as Director of Central Intelligence, and as the 43rd vice president.
+Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and attended Phillips Academy before serving in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Yale University and moved to West Texas, where he established a successful oil company. After an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate, he won election to the 7th congressional district of Texas in 1966. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and to the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed him as the Chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China, and in 1976 Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence. Bush ran for president in 1980, but was defeated in the Republican presidential primaries by Ronald Reagan. He was then elected vice president in 1980 and 1984 as Reagan's running mate.
+In the 1988 presidential election, Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, becoming the first incumbent vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency, as he navigated the final years of the Cold War and played a key role in the reunification of Germany. Bush presided over the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in the latter conflict. Though the agreement was not ratified until after he left office, Bush negotiated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a trade bloc consisting of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Domestically, Bush reneged on a 1988 campaign promise by signing a bill that increased taxes and helped reduce the federal budget deficit. He also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and appointed David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Bush lost the 1992 presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton following an economic recession and the decreased emphasis of foreign policy in a post–Cold War political climate.
+After leaving office in 1993, Bush was active in humanitarian activities, often working alongside Clinton, his former opponent. With the victory of his son, George W. Bush, in the 2000 presidential election, the two became the second father–son pair to serve as the nation's president, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Another son, Jeb Bush, unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 Republican primaries. After a long battle with vascular Parkinson's disease, Bush died at his home on November 30, 2018. Historians generally rank Bush as an above average president.
+George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts[2] on June 12, 1924. He was the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy (Walker) Bush.[3] His paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, worked as an executive for a railroad parts company in Columbus, Ohio,[4] and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, led Wall Street investment bank W. A. Harriman & Co.[5] Bush was named after his maternal grandfather, who was known as "Pop", and young Bush was called "Poppy" as a tribute to his namesake.[6] The Bush family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut in 1925, and Prescott took a position with W. A. Harriman & Co. (which later merged into Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) the following year.[7]
+Bush spent most of his childhood in Greenwich, at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine,[b] or at his maternal grandparents' plantation in South Carolina.[9] Because of the family's wealth, Bush was largely unaffected by the Great Depression, a major economic downturn that led to high levels of unemployment for much of the 1930s.[10] He attended Greenwich Country Day School from 1929 to 1937[11] and Phillips Academy, an elite private academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1937 to 1942.[12] While at Phillips Academy, he served as president of the senior class, secretary of the student council, president of the community fund-raising group, a member of the editorial board of the school newspaper, and captain of the varsity baseball and soccer teams.[13]
+On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, marking the start of U.S. participation in World War II. On his 18th birthday, immediately after graduating from Phillips Academy, he enlisted in the United States Navy as a naval aviator.[14] After a period of training, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi on June 9, 1943, becoming one of the youngest aviators in the Navy.[15][c] Beginning in 1944, Bush served in the Pacific theater of World War II, where he flew a Grumman TBF Avenger, a torpedo bomber capable of taking off from aircraft carriers.[20] His squadron was assigned to the USS San Jacinto as a member of Air Group 51, where his lanky physique earned him the nickname "Skin".[21]
+Bush flew his first combat mission in May 1944, bombing Japanese-held Wake Island,[22] and was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on August 1, 1944. During an attack on a Japanese installation in Chichijima, Bush's aircraft successfully attacked several targets, but was downed by enemy fire.[19] Though both of Bush's fellow crew members died, Bush successfully bailed out from the aircraft and was rescued by the USS Finback.[23][d] Several of the aviators shot down during the attack were captured and executed, and their livers were eaten by their captors.[24] Bush's near-death experience shaped him profoundly, leading him to ask, "Why had I been spared and what did God have for me?"[25] He was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his role in the mission.[26]
+Bush returned to San Jacinto in November 1944, participating in operations in the Philippines.[19] In early 1945, he was assigned to a new combat squadron, VT-153, where he trained to take part in an invasion of mainland Japan. On September 2, 1945, before any invasion took place, Japan formally surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[27] Bush was released from active duty that same month, but was not formally discharged from the navy until October 1955, at which point he had reached the rank of lieutenant.[19] By the end of his period of active service, Bush had flown 58 missions, completed 128 carrier landings, and recorded 1228 hours of flight time.[28]
+Bush met Barbara Pierce at a Christmas dance in Greenwich in December 1941,[29] and, after a period of courtship, they became engaged in December 1943.[30] While Bush was on leave from the navy, they married in Rye, New York, on January 6, 1945.[31] The Bushes enjoyed a strong marriage, and Barbara would later be a popular First Lady, seen by many as "a kind of national grandmother".[32][e] The marriage produced six children: George W. (b. 1946), Robin (b. 1949), Jeb (b. 1953), Neil (b. 1955), Marvin (b. 1956), and Doro (b. 1959).[14] Their oldest daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.[35]
+Following the end of World War II, Bush enrolled at Yale University, where he took part in an accelerated program that enabled him to graduate in two and a half years rather than the usual four.[14] He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was elected its president.[36] He also captained the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series as a left-handed first baseman.[37] Like his father, he was a member of the Yale cheerleading squad[38] and was initiated into the Skull and Bones secret society. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in economics and minoring in sociology.[39]
+After graduating from Yale, Bush moved his young family to West Texas. Biographer Jon Meacham writes that Bush's relocation to Texas allowed him to move out of the "daily shadow of his Wall Street father and Grandfather Walker, two dominant figures in the financial world", but would still allow Bush to "call on their connections if he needed to raise capital."[40] His first position in Texas was an oil field equipment salesman[41] for Dresser Industries, which was led by family friend Neil Mallon.[42] While working for Dresser, Bush lived in various places with his family: Odessa, Texas; Ventura, Bakersfield and Compton, California; and Midland, Texas.[43] In 1952, he volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. That same year, his father won election to represent Connecticut in the United States Senate as a member of the Republican Party.[44]
+With support from Mallon and Bush's uncle, George Herbert Walker Jr., Bush and John Overbey launched the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company in 1951.[45] In 1953 he co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas.[46] In 1954, he was named president of the Zapata Offshore Company, a subsidiary which specialized in offshore drilling.[47] Shortly after the subsidiary became independent in 1959, Bush moved the company and his family from Midland to Houston.[48] In Houston, he befriended James Baker, a prominent attorney who later became an important political ally.[49] Bush remained involved with Zapata until the mid-1960s, when he sold his stock in the company for approximately $1 million.[50] In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this allegation.[51]
+By the early 1960s, Bush was widely regarded as an appealing political candidate, and some leading Democrats attempted to convince Bush to become a Democrat. He declined to leave the Republican Party, later citing his belief that the national Democratic Party favored "big, centralized government". The Democratic Party had historically dominated Texas, but Republicans scored their first major victory in the state with John G. Tower's victory in a 1961 special election to the United States Senate. Motivated by Tower's victory, and hoping to prevent the far-right John Birch Society from coming to power, Bush ran for the chairmanship of the Harris County, Texas Republican Party, winning election in February 1963.[52] Like most other Texas Republicans, Bush supported conservative Senator Barry Goldwater over the more centrist Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican Party presidential primaries.[53]
+In 1964, Bush sought to unseat liberal Democrat Ralph W. Yarborough in Texas's U.S. Senate election.[54] Bolstered by superior fundraising, Bush won the Republican primary by defeating former gubernatorial nominee Jack Cox in a run-off election. In the general election, Bush attacked Yarborough's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial and gender discrimination in public institutions and in many privately owned businesses. Bush argued that the act unconstitutionally expanded the powers of the federal government, but he was privately uncomfortable with the racial politics of opposing the act.[55] He lost the election 56 percent to 44 percent, though he did run well ahead of Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee.[54] Despite the loss, the New York Times reported that Bush was "rated by political friend and foe alike as the Republicans' best prospect in Texas because of his attractive personal qualities and the strong campaign he put up for the Senate".[56]
+In 1966, Bush ran for the United States House of Representatives in Texas's 7th congressional district, a newly redistricted seat in the Greater Houston area. Initial polling showed him trailing his Democratic opponent, Harris County District Attorney Frank Briscoe, but he ultimately won the race with 57 percent of the vote.[57] In an effort to woo potential candidates in the South and Southwest, House Republicans secured Bush an appointment to the powerful United States House Committee on Ways and Means, making Bush the first freshman to serve on the committee since 1904.[58] His voting record in the House was generally conservative. He supported the Nixon administration's Vietnam policies, but broke with Republicans on the issue of birth control, which he supported. He also voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, although it was generally unpopular in his district.[59][60] In 1968, Bush joined several other Republicans in issuing the party's Response to the State of the Union address; Bush's part of the address focused on a call for fiscal responsibility.[61]
+Though most other Texas Republicans supported Ronald Reagan in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries, Bush endorsed Richard Nixon, who went on to win the party's nomination. Nixon considered selecting Bush as his running mate in the 1968 presidential election, but he ultimately chose Spiro Agnew instead. Bush won re-election to the House unopposed, while Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election.[62] In 1970, with President Nixon's support, Bush gave up his seat in the House to run for the Senate against Yarborough. Bush easily won the Republican primary, but Yarborough was defeated by the more centrist Lloyd Bentsen in the Democratic primary.[63] Ultimately, Bentsen defeated Bush, taking 53.5 percent of the vote.[64]
+After the 1970 Senate election, Bush accepted a position as a senior adviser to the president, but he convinced Nixon to instead appoint him as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.[65] The position represented Bush's first foray into foreign policy, as well as his first major experiences with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the two major U.S. rivals in the Cold War.[66] During Bush's tenure, the Nixon administration pursued a policy of détente, seeking to ease tensions with both the Soviet Union and China.[67] Bush's ambassadorship was marked by a defeat on the China question, as the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel the Republic of China and replace it with the People's Republic of China in October 1971.[68] In the 1971 crisis in Pakistan, Bush supported an Indian motion at the UN General Assembly to condemn the Pakistani government of Yahya Khan for waging genocide in East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh), referring to the "tradition which we have supported that the human rights question transcended domestic jurisdiction and should be freely debated".[69] Bush's support for India at the UN put him into conflict with Nixon who was supporting Pakistan, partly because Yahya Khan was a useful intermediary in his attempts to reach out to China and partly because the president was fond of Yahya Khan.[70]
+After Nixon won a landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, he appointed Bush as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).[71][72] In that position, he was charged with fundraising, candidate recruitment, and making appearances on behalf of the party in the media.
+When Agnew was being investigated for corruption, Bush assisted, at the request of Nixon and Agnew, in pressuring John Glenn Beall Jr., the U.S. Senator from Maryland to force his brother, George Beall the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, who was supervising the investigation into Agnew.  Attorney Beall ignored the pressure.[73]
+During Bush's tenure at the RNC, the Watergate scandal emerged into public view; the scandal originated from the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee, but also involved later efforts to cover up the break-in by Nixon and other members of the White House.[74] Bush initially defended Nixon steadfastly, but as Nixon's complicity became clear he focused more on defending the Republican Party.[59]
+Following the resignation of Vice President Agnew in 1973 for a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Bush was considered for the position of vice president, but the appointment instead went to Gerald Ford.[75] After the public release of an audio recording that confirmed that Nixon had plotted to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, Bush joined other party leaders in urging Nixon to resign.[76] When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Bush noted in his diary that "There was an aura of sadness, like somebody died... The [resignation] speech was vintage Nixon—a kick or two at the press—enormous strains. One couldn't help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame... [President Gerald Ford's swearing-in offered] indeed a new spirit, a new lift."[77]
+Upon his ascension to the presidency, Ford strongly considered Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Nelson Rockefeller for the vacant position of vice president. Ford ultimately chose Nelson Rockefeller, partly because of the publication of a news report claiming that Bush's 1970 campaign had benefited from a secret fund set up by Nixon; Bush was later cleared of any suspicion by a special prosecutor.[78] Bush accepted appointment as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, making the him the de facto ambassador to China.[79] According to biographer Jon Meacham, Bush's time in China convinced him that American engagement abroad was needed to ensure global stability, and that the United States "needed to be visible but not pushy, muscular but not domineering."[80]
+In January 1976, Ford brought Bush back to Washington to become the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), placing him in charge of the CIA.[81] In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, the CIA's reputation had been damaged for its role in various covert operations, and Bush was tasked with restoring the agency's morale and public reputation.[82][f] During Bush's year in charge of the CIA, the U.S. national security apparatus actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.[83][84] Meanwhile, Ford decided to drop Rockefeller from the ticket for the 1976 presidential election; he considered Bush as his running mate, but ultimately chose Bob Dole.[85] In his capacity as DCI, Bush gave national security briefings to Jimmy Carter both as a presidential candidate and as president-elect.[86]
+Bush's tenure at the CIA ended after Carter narrowly defeated Ford in the 1976 presidential election. Out of public office for the first time since the 1960s, Bush became chairman on the Executive Committee of the First International Bank in Houston.[87] He also spent a year as a part-time professor of Administrative Science at Rice University's Jones School of Business,[88] continued his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, and joined the Trilateral Commission. Meanwhile, he began to lay the groundwork for his candidacy in the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries.[89] In the 1980 Republican primary campaign, Bush would face Ronald Reagan, who was widely regarded as the front-runner, as well as other contenders like Senator Bob Dole, Senator Howard Baker, Texas Governor John Connally, Congressman Phil Crane, and Congressman John B. Anderson.[90]
+Bush's campaign cast him as a youthful, "thinking man's candidate" who would emulate the pragmatic conservatism of President Eisenhower.[91] In the midst of the Soviet–Afghan War, which brought an end to a period of détente, and the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 Americans were taken hostage, the campaign highlighted Bush's foreign policy experience.[92] At the outset of the race, Bush focused heavily on winning the January 21 Iowa caucuses, making 31 visits to the state.[93] Ultimately, he won a close victory Iowa with 31.5% to Reagan's 29.4%. After the win, Bush stated that his campaign was full of momentum, or "the Big Mo",[94] and Reagan reorganized his campaign.[95] Partly in response to the Bush campaign's frequent questioning of Reagan's age (Reagan turned 69 in 1980), the Reagan campaign stepped up attacks on Bush, painting him as an elitist who was not truly committed to conservatism.[96] Prior to the New Hampshire primary, Bush and Reagan agreed to a two-person debate, organized by The Nashua Telegraph but paid for by the Reagan campaign.[95]
+Days before the debate, Reagan announced that he would invite four other candidates to the debate; Bush, who had hoped that the one-on-one debate would allow him to emerge as the main alternative to Reagan in the primaries, refused to debate the other candidate. All six candidates took the stage, but Bush refused to speak in the presence of the other candidates. Ultimately, the other four candidates left the stage and the debate continued, but Bush's refusal to debate anyone other than Reagan badly damaged his campaign in New Hampshire.[97] He ended up decisively losing New Hampshire's primary to Reagan, winning just 23 percent of the vote.[95] Bush revitalized his campaign with a victory in Massachusetts, but lost the next several primaries. As Reagan built up a commanding delegate lead, Bush refused to end his campaign, but the other candidates dropped out of the race.[98] Criticizing his more conservative rival's policy proposals, Bush famously labeled Reagan's supply side-influenced plans for massive tax cuts as "voodoo economics".[99] Though he favored lower taxes, Bush feared that dramatic reductions in taxation would lead to deficits and, in turn, cause inflation.[100]
+After Reagan clinched a majority of delegates in late May, Bush reluctantly dropped out of the race.[101] At the 1980 Republican National Convention, Reagan made the last-minute decision to select Bush as his vice presidential nominee after negotiations with Ford regarding a Reagan-Ford ticket collapsed.[102] Though Reagan had resented many of the Bush campaign's attacks during the primary campaign, and several conservative leaders had actively opposed Bush's nomination, Reagan ultimately decided that Bush's popularity with moderate Republicans made him the best and safest pick.[103] Bush, who had believed his political career might be over following the primaries, eagerly accepted the position and threw himself into campaigning for the Reagan-Bush ticket.[104] The 1980 general election campaign between Reagan and Carter was conducted amid a multitude of domestic concerns and the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, and Reagan sought to focus the race on Carter's handling of the economy.[105] Though the race was widely regarded as a close contest for most of the campaign, Reagan ultimately won over the large majority of undecided voters.[106] Reagan took 50.7 percent of the popular vote and 489 of the 538 electoral votes, while Carter won 41% of the popular vote and John Anderson, running as an independent candidate, won 6.6% of the popular vote.[107]
+As vice president, Bush generally maintained a low profile, recognizing the constitutional limits of the office; he avoided decision-making or criticizing Reagan in any way. This approach helped him earn Reagan's trust, easing tensions left over from their earlier rivalry.[95] Bush also generally enjoyed a good relationship with Reagan staffers, including his close friend Jim Baker, who served as Reagan's initial chief of staff.[108] His understanding of the vice presidency was heavily influenced by Vice President Walter Mondale, who enjoyed a strong relationship with President Carter in part because of his ability to avoid confrontations with senior staff and Cabinet members, and by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's difficult relationship with some members of the White House staff during the Ford administration.[109] The Bushes attended a large number of public and ceremonial events in their positions, including many state funerals, which became a common joke for comedians. As the President of the Senate, Bush also stayed in contact with members of Congress and kept the president informed on occurrences on Capitol Hill.[95]
+On March 30, 1981, while Bush was in Texas, Reagan was shot and seriously wounded by John Hinckley Jr. Bush immediately flew back from Washington D.C.; when his plane landed, his aides advised him to proceed directly to the White House by helicopter in order to show that the government was still functioning.[95] Bush rejected the idea, as he feared that such a dramatic scene risked giving the impression that he sought to usurp Reagan's powers and prerogatives.[110] During Reagan's short period of incapacity, Bush presided over Cabinet meetings, met with congressional leaders and foreign leaders, and briefed reporters, but he consistently rejected the possibility of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment.[111] Bush's handling of the attempted assassination and its aftermath made a positive impression on Reagan, who recovered and returned to work within two weeks of the shooting. From then on, the two men would have regular Thursday lunches in the Oval Office.[112]
+Bush was assigned by Reagan to chair two special task forces, one on deregulation and one on international drug smuggling. Both were popular issues with conservatives, and Bush, largely a moderate, began courting them through his work. The deregulation task force reviewed hundreds of rules, making specific recommendations on which ones to amend or revise, in order to curb the size of the federal government.[95] The Reagan administration's deregulation push had a strong impact on broadcasting, finance, resource extraction, and other economic activities, and the administration eliminated numerous government positions.[113] Bush also oversaw the administration's national security crisis management organization, which had traditionally been the responsibility of the National Security Advisor.[114] In 1983, Bush toured Western Europe as part of the Reagan administration's ultimately successful efforts to convince skeptical NATO allies to support the deployment of Pershing II missiles.[115]
+Reagan's approval ratings fell after his first year in office, but they bounced back when the United States began to emerge from recession in 1983.[116] Former Vice President Walter Mondale was nominated by the Democratic Party in the 1984 presidential election. Down in the polls, Mondale selected Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in hopes of galvanizing support for his campaign, thus making Ferraro the first female major party vice presidential nominee in U.S. history.[117] She and Bush squared off in a single televised vice presidential debate.[95] Public opinion polling consistently showed a Reagan lead in the 1984 campaign, and Mondale was unable to shake up the race.[118] In the end, Reagan won re-election, winning 49 of 50 states and receiving 59% of the popular vote to Mondale's 41%.[119]
+Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985; less ideologically rigid than his predecessors, Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union urgently needed economic and political reforms.[120] At the 1987 Washington Summit, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which committed both signatories to the total abolition of their respective short-range and medium-range missile stockpiles.[121] The treaty marked the beginning of a new era of trade, openness, and cooperation between the two powers.[122] Though President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz took the lead in these negotiations, Bush sat in on many meetings and promised Gorbachev that he would seek to continue improving Soviet-U.S. relations if he succeeded Reagan.[123] On July 13, 1985, Bush became the first vice president to serve as acting president when Reagan underwent surgery to remove polyps from his colon; Bush served as the acting president for approximately eight hours.[124]
+In 1986, the Reagan administration was shaken by a scandal when it was revealed that administration officials had secretly arranged weapon sales to Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. The officials had used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, which was a direct violation of law.[95] When news of affair broke to the media, Bush, like Reagan, stated that he had been "out of the loop" and unaware of the diversion of funds, although this has assertion has since been challenged.[125] Biographer Jon Meacham writes that "no evidence was ever produced proving Bush was aware of the diversion to the contras," but he criticizes Bush's "out of the loop" characterization, writing that the "record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages".[126] The Iran–Contra scandal, as it became known, did serious damage to the Reagan presidency, raising questions about Reagan's competency.[127] Congress established the Tower Commission to investigate the scandal, and, at Reagan's request, a panel of federal judges appointed Lawrence Walsh as a special prosecutor charged with investigating the Iran–Contra scandal.[128] The investigations continued after Reagan left office and, though Bush was never charged with a crime, the Iran–Contra scandal would remain a political liability for him.[129]
+Bush began planning for a presidential run after the 1984 election, and he officially entered the 1988 Republican Party presidential primaries in October 1987.[95] He put together a campaign led by Reagan staffer Lee Atwater, and which also included his son, George W. Bush, and media consultant Roger Ailes.[130] Though he had moved to the right during his time as vice president, endorsing a Human Life Amendment and repudiating his earlier comments on "voodoo economics," Bush still faced opposition from many conservatives in the Republican Party.[131] His major rivals for the Republican nomination were Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, and Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.[132] Reagan did not publicly endorse any candidate, but he privately expressed support for Bush.[133]
+Though considered the early front-runner for the nomination, Bush came in third in the Iowa caucus, behind Dole and Robertson.[134] Much as Reagan had done in 1980, Bush reorganized his staff and concentrated on the New Hampshire primary.[95] With help from Governor John H. Sununu and an effective campaign attacking Dole for raising taxes, Bush overcame an initial polling deficit and won New Hampshire with 39 percent of the vote.[135] After Bush won South Carolina and 16 of the 17 states holding a primary on Super Tuesday, his competitors dropped out of the race.[136]
+Bush, occasionally criticized for his lack of eloquence when compared to Reagan, delivered a well-received speech at the Republican convention. Known as the "thousand points of light" speech, it described Bush's vision of America: he endorsed the Pledge of Allegiance, prayer in schools, capital punishment, and gun rights.[137] Bush also pledged that he would not raise taxes, stating: "Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And all I can say to them is: read my lips. No new taxes."[138] Bush selected little-known Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. Though Quayle had compiled an unremarkable record in Congress, he was popular among many conservatives, and the campaign hoped that Quayle's youth would appeal to younger voters.[139]
+Meanwhile, the Democratic Party nominated Governor Michael Dukakis, who was known for presiding over an economic turnaround in Massachusetts.[140] Leading in the general election polls against Bush, Dukakis ran an ineffective, low-risk campaign.[141] The Bush campaign attacked Dukakis as an unpatriotic liberal extremist and seized on Dukakis's pardon of Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who had raped a woman while on a prison furlough. The Bush campaign charged that Dukakis presided over a "revolving door" that allowed dangerous convicted felons to leave prison.[142] Dukakis damaged his own campaign with a widely mocked ride in an M1 Abrams tank and a poor performance at the second presidential debate.[143] Bush also attacked Dukakis for opposing a law that would require all students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[137] The election is widely considered to have had a high level of negative campaigning, though political scientist John Geer has argued that the share of negative ads was in line with previous presidential elections.[144]
+Bush defeated Dukakis by a margin of 426 to 111 in the Electoral College, and he took 53.4 percent of the national popular vote.[145] Bush ran well in all the major regions of the country, but especially in the South.[146] He became the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, the first person to succeed a president from his own party via election since Herbert Hoover in 1929.[95][g] In the concurrent congressional elections, Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.[148]
+Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 1989, succeeding Ronald Reagan. In his inaugural address, Bush said:
+I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken.[149]
+Bush's first major appointment was that of James Baker as Secretary of State.[150] Leadership of the Department of Defense went to Dick Cheney, who had had previously served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff and would later serve as vice president under George W. Bush.[151] Jack Kemp joined the administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, while Elizabeth Dole, the wife of Bob Dole and a former Secretary of Transportation, became the Secretary of Labor under Bush.[152] Bush retained several Reagan officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos.[153] New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, a strong supporter of Bush during the 1988 campaign, became chief of staff.[150] Brent Scowcroft was appointed as the National Security Advisor, a role he had also held under Ford.[154]
+During the first year of his tenure, Bush pursued what Soviets referred to as the pauza, a break in Reagan's détente policies.[155] Bush and his advisers were initially divided on Gorbachev; some administration officials saw him as a democratic reformer, but others suspected him of trying to make the minimum changes necessary to restore the Soviet Union to a competitive position with the United States.[156] In 1989, Communist governments fell in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the governments of Bulgaria and Romania instituted major reforms, and the government of East Germany opened the Berlin Wall, which was subsequently demolished by Berliners.[157] Many Soviet leaders urged Gorbachev to crush the dissidents in Eastern Europe, but Gorbachev declined to send in the Soviet military, effectively abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine.[158] The U.S. was not directly involved in these upheavals, but the Bush administration avoided the appearance of gloating over the demise of the Eastern Bloc to avoid undermining further democratic reforms.[157] Bush also helped convince Polish leaders to allow democratic elections and became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hungary.[159]
+By mid-1989, as unrest blanketed Eastern Europe, Bush requested a meeting with Gorbachev, and the two agreed to hold the December 1989 Malta Summit.[158] Though many on the right remained wary of Gorbachev, Bush came away from the Malta Summit with the belief that Gorbachev would negotiate in good faith.[160] For the remainder of his term, Bush sought cooperative relations with Gorbachev, believing that the Soviet leader was the key to peacefully ending the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.[161] The key issue at the Malta Summit was the potential reunification of Germany.[162] While Britain and France were wary of a re-unified Germany, Bush joined West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in pushing for German reunification.[163] Bush believed that a reunified Germany would serve U.S. interests, but he also saw reunification as providing a final symbolic end to World War II.[164] After extensive negotiations, Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to be a part of NATO, and Germany officially reunified in October 1990.[165]
+Though Gorbachev acquiesced to the democratization of Soviet satellite states, he suppressed nationalist movements within the Soviet Union itself.[166] A crisis in Lithuania left Bush in a difficult position, as he needed Gorbachev's cooperation in the reunification of Germany and feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union could leave nuclear arms in dangerous hands. The Bush administration mildly protested Gorbachev's suppression of Lithuania's independence movement, but took no action to directly intervene.[167] Bush warned independence movements of the disorder that could come with secession from the Soviet Union; in a 1991 address that critics labeled the "Chicken Kiev speech", he cautioned against "suicidal nationalism".[168] In July 1991, Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) treaty, in which both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent.[169]
+In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government.[170] Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until December 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.[171] Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, and of those states, Russia was the largest and most populous. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership".[172] In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.[173] The collapse of the Soviet Union prompted reflections on the future of the world following the end of the Cold War; one political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, speculated that humanity had reached the "end of history" in that liberal, capitalist democracy had permanently triumphed over Communism and fascism.[174] Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments led to post-Soviet conflicts in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa that would continue long after Bush left office.[175]
+During the 1980s, the U.S. had provided aid to Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, an anti-Communist dictator who engaged in drug trafficking. In May 1989, Noriega annulled the results of a democratic presidential election in which Guillermo Endara had been elected. Bush objected to the annulment of the election and worried about the status of the Panama Canal with Noriega still in office.[176] Bush dispatched 2,000 soldiers to the country, where they began conducting regular military exercises in violation of prior treaties.[177] After a U.S. serviceman was shot by Panamanian forces in December 1989, Bush ordered the United States invasion of Panama, known as "Operation Just Cause". The invasion was the first large-scale American military operation in more than 40 years that was not related to the Cold War. American forces quickly took control of the Panama Canal Zone and Panama City. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was quickly transported to a prison in the United States. Twenty-three Americans died in the operation, while another 394 were wounded. Noriega was convicted and imprisoned on racketeering and drug trafficking charges in April 1992.[176] Historian Stewart Brewer argues that the invasion "represented a new era in American foreign policy" because Bush did not justify the invasion under the Monroe Doctrine or the threat of Communism, but rather on the grounds that it was in the best interests of the United States.[178]
+Faced with massive debts and low oil prices in the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein decided to conquer the country of Kuwait, a small, oil-rich country situated on Iraq's southern border.[179] After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush imposed economic sanctions on Iraq and assembled a multi-national coalition opposed to the invasion.[180] The administration feared that a failure to respond to the invasion would embolden Hussein to attack Saudi Arabia or Israel, and wanted to discourage other countries from similar aggression.[181] Bush also wanted to ensure continued access to oil, as Iraq and Kuwait collectively accounted for 20 percent of the world's oil production, and Saudi Arabia produced another 26 percent of the world's oil supply.[182]
+At Bush's insistence, in November 1990, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not withdrawal from Kuwait by January 15, 1991.[183] Gorbachev's support, as well as China's abstention, helped ensure passage of the UN resolution.[184] Bush convinced Britain, France, and other nations to commit soldiers to an operation against Iraq, and he won important financial backing from Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.[185] In January 1991, Bush asked Congress to approve a joint resolution authorizing a war against Iraq.[186] Bush believed that the UN resolution had already provided him with the necessary authorization to launch a military operation against Iraq, but he wanted to show that the nation was united behind a military action.[187] Despite the opposition of a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991.[186]
+After the January 15 deadline passed without an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces began a conducted a bombing campaign that devastated Iraq's power grid and communications network, and resulted in the desertion of about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers. In retaliation, Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but most of the missiles did little damage. On February 23, coalition forces began a ground invasion into Kuwait, evicting Iraqi forces by the end of February 27. About 300 Americans, as well as approximately 65 soldiers from other coalition nations, died during the military action.[188] A cease fire was arranged on March 3, and the UN passed a resolution establishing a peacekeeping force in a demilitarized zone between Kuwait and Iraq.[189] A March 1991 Gallup poll showed that Bush had an approval rating of 89 percent, the highest presidential approval rating in the history of Gallup polling.[190] After 1991, the UN maintained economic sanctions against Iraq, and the United Nations Special Commission was assigned to ensure that Iraq did not revive its weapons of mass destruction program.[191]
+In 1987, the U.S. and Canada had reached a free trade agreement that eliminated many tariffs between the two countries. President Reagan had intended it as the first step towards a larger trade agreement to eliminate most tariffs among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.[192] The Bush administration, along with the Progressive Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, spearheaded the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. In addition to lowering tariffs, the proposed treaty would affected patents, copyrights, and trademarks.[193] In 1991, Bush sought fast track authority, which grants the president the power to submit an international trade agreement to Congress without the possibility of amendment. Despite congressional opposition led by House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, both houses of Congress voted to grant Bush fast track authority. NAFTA was signed in December 1992, after Bush lost re-election,[194] but President Clinton won ratification of NAFTA in 1993.[195] NAFTA remains controversial for its impact on wages, jobs, and overall economic growth.[196]
+The U.S. economy had generally performed well since emerging from recession in late 1982, but it slipped into a mild recession in 1990. The unemployment rate rose from 5.9 percent in 1989 to a high of 7.8 percent in mid-1991.[197][198] Large federal deficits, spawned during the Reagan years, rose from $152.1 billion in 1989[199] to $220 billion for 1990;[200] the $220 billion deficit represented a threefold increase since 1980.[201] As the public became increasingly concerned about the economy and other domestic affairs, Bush's well-received handling of foreign affairs became less of an issue for most voters.[202] Bush's top domestic priority was to bring an end to federal budget deficits, which he saw as a liability for the country's long-term economic health and standing in the world.[203] As he was opposed to major defense spending cuts[204] and had pledged to not raise taxes, the president had major difficulties in balancing the budget.[205]
+Bush and congressional leaders agreed to avoid major changes to the budget for fiscal year 1990, which began in October 1989. However, both sides knew that spending cuts or new taxes would be necessary in the following year's budget in order to avoid the draconian automatic domestic spending cuts required by the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1987.[206] Bush and other leaders also wanted to cut deficits because Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan refused to lower interest rates, and thus stimulate economic growth, unless the federal budget deficit was reduced.[207] In a statement released in late June 1990, Bush said that he would be open to a deficit reduction program which included spending cuts, incentives for economic growth, budget process reform, as well as tax increases.[208] To fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party, Bush's statement represented a betrayal, and they heavily criticized him for compromising so early in the negotiations.[209]
+In September 1990, Bush and Congressional Democrats announced a compromise to cut funding for mandatory and discretionary programs while also raising revenue, partly through a higher gas tax. The compromise additionally included a "pay as you go" provision that required that new programs be paid for at the time of implementation.[210] House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich led the conservative opposition to the bill, strongly opposing any form of tax increase.[211] Some liberals also criticized the budget cuts in the compromise, and in October, the House rejected the deal, resulting in a brief government shutdown. Without the strong backing of the Republican Party, Bush agreed to another compromise bill, this one more favorable to Democrats. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA-90), enacted on October 27, 1990, dropped much of the gasoline tax increase in favor of higher income taxes on top earners. It included cuts to domestic spending, but the cuts were not as deep as those that had been proposed in the original compromise. Bush's decision to sign the bill damaged his standing with conservatives and the general public, but it also laid the groundwork for the budget surpluses of the late 1990s.[212]
+-Bush's remarks at the signing ceremony for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990[213]
+The disabled had not received legal protections under the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many faced discrimination and segregation by the time Bush took office. In 1988, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and Tony Coelho had introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act, which barred employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities. The bill had passed the Senate but not the House, and it was reintroduced in 1989. Though some conservatives opposed the bill due to its costs and potential burdens on businesses, Bush strongly supported it, partly because his son, Neil, had struggled with dyslexia. After the bill passed both houses of Congress, Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 into law in July 1990.[214] The act required employers and public accommodations to make "reasonable accommodations" for the disabled, while providing an exception when such accommodations imposed an "undue hardship".[215]
+Senator Ted Kennedy later led the congressional passage of a separate civil rights bill designed to facilitate launching employment discrimination lawsuits.[216] In vetoing the bill, Bush argued that it would lead to racial quotas in hiring.[217][218] In November 1991, Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which was largely similar to the bill he had vetoed in the previous year.[216]
+In August 1990, Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded program dedicated to assisting persons living with HIV/AIDS.[219] Throughout his presidency, the AIDS epidemic grew dramatically in the U.S. and around the world, and Bush often found himself at odds with AIDS activist groups who criticized him for not placing a high priority on HIV/AIDS research and funding. Frustrated by the administration's lack of urgency on the issue, ACT UP, dumped the ashes of HIV/AIDS victims on the White House lawn during a viewing of the AIDS Quilt in 1992.[220] By that time, HIV had become the leading cause of death in the U.S. for men aged 25–44.[221]
+In June 1989, the Bush administration proposed a bill to amend the Clean Air Act. Working with Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, the administration won passage of the amendments over the opposition of business-aligned members of Congress who feared the impact of tougher regulations.[222] The legislation sought to curb acid rain and smog by requiring decreased emissions of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide,[223] and was the first major update to the Clean Air Act since 1977.[224] Bush also signed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. However, the League of Conservation Voters criticized some of Bush's other environmental actions, including his opposition to stricter auto-mileage standards.[225]
+President Bush devoted attention to voluntary service as a means of solving some of America's most serious social problems. He often used the "thousand points of light" theme to describe the power of citizens to solve community problems. In his 1989 inaugural address, President Bush said, "I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good."[226] During his presidency, Bush honored numerous volunteers with the Daily Point of Light Award, a tradition that was continued by his presidential successors.[227] In 1990, the Points of Light Foundation was created as a nonprofit organization in Washington to promote this spirit of volunteerism.[228] In 2007, the Points of Light Foundation merged with the Hands On Network to create a new organization, Points of Light.[229]
+Bush appointed two justices to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1990, Bush appointed a largely unknown state appellate judge, David Souter, to replace liberal icon William Brennan.[230] Souter was easily confirmed and served until 2009, but joined the liberal bloc of the court, disappointing Bush.[230] In 1991, Bush nominated conservative federal judge Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall, a long-time liberal stalwart. Thomas, the former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), faced heavy opposition in the Senate, as well as from pro-choice groups and the NAACP. His nomination faced another difficulty when Anita Hill accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her during his time as the chair of EEOC. Thomas won confirmation in a narrow 52–48 vote; 43 Republicans and 9 Democrats voted to confirm Thomas's nomination, while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against confirmation.[231] Thomas became one of the most conservative justices of his era.[232] In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 42 judges to the United States courts of appeals, and 148 judges to the United States district courts. Among these appointments were future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as well as Vaughn R. Walker, who was later revealed to be the earliest known gay federal judge.[233]
+Bush's education platform consisted mainly of offering federal support for a variety of innovations, such as open enrollment, incentive pay for outstanding teachers, and rewards for schools that improve performance with underprivileged children.[234] Though Bush did not pass a major educational reform package during his presidency, his ideas influenced later reform efforts, including Goals 2000 and the No Child Left Behind Act.[235] Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990,[236] which led to a 40 percent increase in legal immigration to the United States.[237] The act more than doubled the number of visas given to immigrants on the basis of job skills.[238] In the wake of the savings and loan crisis, Bush proposed a $50 billion package to rescue the savings and loans industry, and also proposed the creation of the Office of Thrift Supervision to regulate the industry. Congress passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, which incorporated most of Bush's proposals.[239]
+Bush was widely seen as a "pragmatic caretaker" president who lacked a unified and compelling long-term theme in his efforts.[240][241][242] Indeed, Bush's sound bite where he refers to the issue of overarching purpose as "the vision thing" has become a metonym applied to other political figures accused of similar difficulties.[243][244][245][246][247][248] His ability to gain broad international support for the Gulf War and the war's result were seen as both a diplomatic and military triumph,[249] rousing bipartisan approval,[250] though his decision to withdraw without removing Saddam Hussein left mixed feelings, and attention returned to the domestic front and a souring economy.[251] A New York Times article mistakenly depicted Bush as being surprised to see a supermarket barcode reader;[252][253] the report of his reaction exacerbated the notion that he was "out of touch".[252] Amid the early 1990s recession, his image shifted from "conquering hero" to "politician befuddled by economic matters".[254]
+Bush announced his reelection bid in early 1992; with a coalition victory in the Persian Gulf War and high approval ratings, Bush's reelection initially looked likely.[255] As a result, many leading Democrats, including Mario Cuomo, Dick Gephardt, and Al Gore, declined to seek their party's presidential nomination.[256] However, Bush's tax increase had angered many conservatives, who believed that Bush had strayed from the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan.[257] He faced a challenge from conservative political columnist Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primaries.[258] Bush fended off Buchanan's challenge and won his party's nomination at the 1992 Republican National Convention, but the convention adopted a socially conservative platform strongly influenced by the Christian right.[259]
+Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. A moderate who was affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Clinton favored welfare reform, deficit reduction, and a tax cut for the middle class.[260] In early 1992, the race took an unexpected twist when Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot launched a third party bid, claiming that neither Republicans nor Democrats could eliminate the deficit and make government more efficient. His message appealed to voters across the political spectrum disappointed with both parties' perceived fiscal irresponsibility.[261] Perot also attacked NAFTA, which he claimed would lead to major job losses.[262] National polling taken in mid-1992 showed Perot in the lead, but Clinton experienced a surge through effective campaigning and the selection of Senator Al Gore, a popular and relatively young Southerner, as his running mate.[263]
+Clinton won the election, taking 43 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes, while Bush won 37.5 percent of the popular vote and 168 electoral votes.[264] Perot won 19% of the popular vote, one of the highest totals for a third party candidate in U.S. history, drawing equally from both major candidates, according to exit polls.[265] Clinton performed well in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast, while also waging the strongest Democratic campaign in the South since the 1976 election.[266] Several factors were important in Bush's defeat. The ailing economy which arose from recession may have been the main factor in Bush's loss, as 7 in 10 voters said on election day that the economy was either "not so good" or "poor".[267][268] On the eve of the 1992 election, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8%, which was the highest it had been since 1984.[269] The president was also damaged by his alienation of many conservatives in his party.[270] Bush blamed Perot in part for his defeat, though exit polls showed that Perot drew his voters about equally from Clinton and Bush.[271]
+Despite his defeat, Bush left office with a 56 percent job approval rating in January 1993.[272] Like many of his predecessors, Bush issued a series of pardons during his last days in office. In December 1992, he granted executive clemency to six former senior government officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, most prominently former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.[273] The pardons effectively brought an end to special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal.[274]
+After leaving office, Bush and his wife built a retirement house in the community of West Oaks, Houston.[275] He established a presidential office within the Park Laureate Building on Memorial Drive in Houston.[276] He also frequently spent time at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, took annual cruises in Greece, went on fishing trips in Florida, and visited the Bohemian Club in Northern California. He declined to serve on corporate boards, but delivered numerous paid speeches and served as an adviser to The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.[277] He never published his memoirs, but he and Brent Scowcroft co-wrote A World Transformed, a 1999 work on foreign policy. Portions of his letters and his diary were later published as The China Diary of George H. W. Bush and All The Best, George Bush.[278]
+During a 1993 visit to Kuwait, Bush was targeted in an assassination plot directed by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. President Clinton retaliated when he ordered the firing of 23 cruise missiles at Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad.[279] Bush did not publicly comment on the assassination attempt or the missile strike, but privately spoke with Clinton shortly before the strike took place.[280] In the 1994 gubernatorial elections, his sons George W. and Jeb concurrently ran for Governor of Texas and Governor of Florida. Concerning their political careers, he advised them both that "[a]t some point both of you may want to say 'Well, I don't agree with my Dad on that point' or 'Frankly I think Dad was wrong on that.' Do it. Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves".[281] George W. won his race against Ann Richards while Jeb lost to Lawton Chiles. After the results came in, the elder Bush told ABC, "I have very mixed emotions. Proud father, is the way I would sum it all up."[282] Jeb would again run for governor of Florida in 1998 and win at the same time that his brother George W. won re-election in Texas. It marked the second time in United States history that a pair of brothers served simultaneously as governors.[283]
+Bush supported his son's candidacy in the 2000 presidential election, but did not actively campaign in the election and did not deliver a speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention.[284] George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the 2000 election and was re-elected in 2004. Bush and his son thus became the second father–son pair to each serve as President of the United States, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.[285] Through previous administrations, the elder Bush had ubiquitously been known as "George Bush" or "President Bush", but following his son's election the need to distinguish between them has made retronymic forms such as "George H. W. Bush" and "George Bush Sr." and colloquialisms such as "Bush 41" and "Bush the Elder" more common.[286] Bush advised his son on some personnel choices, approving of the selection of Dick Cheney as running mate and the retention of George Tenet as CIA Director. However, he was not consulted on all appointments, including that of his old rival, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense.[287] Though he avoided giving unsolicited advice to his son, Bush and his son also discussed some matters of policy, especially regarding national security issues.[288]
+In his retirement, Bush generally avoided publicly expressing his opinion on political issues, instead using the public spotlight to support various charities.[289] Despite earlier political differences with Bill Clinton, the two former presidents eventually became friends.[290] They appeared together in television ads, encouraging aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.[291]
+Bush supported Republican John McCain in the 2008 presidential election,[292] and Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election,[293] but both were defeated by Democrat Barack Obama. In 2011, Obama awarded Bush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.[294]
+Bush supported his son Jeb's bid in the 2016 presidential election.[295] Jeb Bush's campaign struggled however, and he withdrew from the race during the primaries. Neither George H.W. nor George W. Bush endorsed the eventual Republican nominee, Donald Trump;[296] all three Bushes emerged as frequent critics of Trump's policies and speaking style, while Trump frequently criticized George W. Bush's presidency. George H. W. Bush later said that he voted for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the general election.[297] After the election, Bush wrote a letter to president-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 to inform him that because of his poor health, he would not be able to attend Trump's inauguration on January 20; he gave him his best wishes.[298]
+In August 2017, after the violence at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, both Presidents Bush released a joint statement saying, "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms," the statement from presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush reads. "As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights."[299][300]
+On April 17, 2018, Bush's wife Former First Lady Barbara Bush died at the age of 92,[301] at her home in Houston, Texas. Her funeral was held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston four days later.[302][303] Bush along with former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush (son), Bill Clinton and fellow First Ladies Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush (daughter-in-law) and Hillary Clinton were representatives who attended the funeral and who also took a photo together after the service as a sign of unity which went viral online.[304][305]
+On November 1, Bush went to the polls to vote early in the midterm elections. This would be his final public appearance.[306]
+George H. W. Bush died on November 30, 2018, aged 94 years, 171 days,[307] at his home in Houston.[308] At the time of his death he was the longest-lived U.S. president,[309] a distinction now held by Jimmy Carter.[310] He was also the third-oldest vice president.[h] Bush lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from December 3 through December 5; he was the 12th U.S. president to be accorded this honor.[312][313] Then, on December 5, Bush's casket was transferred from the Capitol rotunda to Washington National Cathedral where a state funeral was held.[314] After the funeral, Bush's body was transported to George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he was buried next to his wife Barbara and daughter Robin.[315] At the funeral, former president George W. Bush eulogized his father saying,
+"He looked for the good in each person, and he usually found it."[314]
+In 1991, The New York Times revealed that Bush was suffering from Graves' disease, a non-contagious thyroid condition that his wife Barbara also suffered from.[316] Later in life, Bush suffered from vascular parkinsonism, a form of Parkinson's disease which forced him to use a motorized scooter or wheelchair.[317]
+Bush was raised in the Episcopal Church, though by the end of his life his apparent religious beliefs are considered to have more in line with Evangelical Christian doctrine and practices.[318] He cited various moments in his life deepening of his faith, including his escape from Japanese forces in 1944, and the death of his three-year-old daughter Robin in 1953.[319] His faith was reflected in his Thousand Points of Light speech, his support for prayer in schools, and his support for the pro-life movement (following his election as vice president).[318][319]
+Polls of historians and political scientists have ranked Bush in the top half of presidents. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association's Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked Bush as the 17th best president out of 44.[320] A 2017 C-Span poll of historians also ranked Bush as the 20th best president out of 43.[321] Richard Rose described Bush as a "guardian" president, and many other historians and political scientists have similarly described Bush as a passive, hands-off president who was "largely content with things as they were".[322] Professor Steven Knott writes that "[g]enerally the Bush presidency is viewed as successful in foreign affairs but a disappointment in domestic affairs."[323]
+Biographer Jon Meacham writes that, after he left office, many Americans viewed Bush as "a gracious and underappreciated man who had many virtues but who had failed to project enough of a distinctive identity and vision to overcome the economic challenges of 1991–92 and to win a second term."[324] Bush himself noted that his legacy was "lost between the glory of Reagan ... and the trials and tribulations of my sons."[325] In the 2010s, Bush was fondly remembered for his willingness to compromise, which contrasted with the intensely partisan era that followed his presidency.[326]
+According to USA Today, the legacy of Bush's presidency was defined by his victory over Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, and for his presiding over the collapse of the USSR and the re-unification of Germany.[327] Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott praise Bush's handling of the USSR, especially how he prodded Gorbachev in terms of releasing control over the satellites and permitting German unification—and especially a united Germany in NATO.[328] Andrew Bacevich judges the Bush administration as “morally obtuse” in the light of its “business-as-usual” attitude towards China after the massacre in Tiananmen Square and its uncritical support of Gorbachev as the Soviet Union disintegrated.[329] David Rothkopf argues:
+In 1990, Time magazine named him the Man of the Year.[331] In 1997, the Houston Intercontinental Airport was renamed as the George Bush Intercontinental Airport.[332] In 1999, the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in his honor.[333] In 2011, Bush, an avid golfer, was inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame.[334] The USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), the tenth and last Nimitz-class supercarrier of the United States Navy, was named for Bush.[335][336] Bush is commemorated on a postage stamp that was issued by the United States Postal Service in 2019.[337]
+The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the tenth U.S. presidential library, was completed in 1997.[338] It contains the presidential and vice presidential papers of Bush and the vice presidential papers of Dan Quayle.[339] The library is located on a 90-acre (36 ha) site on the west campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.[340] Texas A&M University also hosts the Bush School of Government and Public Service, a graduate public policy school.[340]
+Convention
+Primaries
+Convention
+Primaries

en/2178.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,177 @@

+George Herbert Walker Bush[a] (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018) was an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993. A member of the Republican Party, Bush also served in the U.S. House of Representatives, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as Director of Central Intelligence, and as the 43rd vice president.
+Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and attended Phillips Academy before serving in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Yale University and moved to West Texas, where he established a successful oil company. After an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate, he won election to the 7th congressional district of Texas in 1966. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and to the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed him as the Chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China, and in 1976 Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence. Bush ran for president in 1980, but was defeated in the Republican presidential primaries by Ronald Reagan. He was then elected vice president in 1980 and 1984 as Reagan's running mate.
+In the 1988 presidential election, Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, becoming the first incumbent vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency, as he navigated the final years of the Cold War and played a key role in the reunification of Germany. Bush presided over the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in the latter conflict. Though the agreement was not ratified until after he left office, Bush negotiated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a trade bloc consisting of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Domestically, Bush reneged on a 1988 campaign promise by signing a bill that increased taxes and helped reduce the federal budget deficit. He also signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and appointed David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Bush lost the 1992 presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton following an economic recession and the decreased emphasis of foreign policy in a post–Cold War political climate.
+After leaving office in 1993, Bush was active in humanitarian activities, often working alongside Clinton, his former opponent. With the victory of his son, George W. Bush, in the 2000 presidential election, the two became the second father–son pair to serve as the nation's president, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Another son, Jeb Bush, unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 Republican primaries. After a long battle with vascular Parkinson's disease, Bush died at his home on November 30, 2018. Historians generally rank Bush as an above average president.
+George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts[2] on June 12, 1924. He was the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy (Walker) Bush.[3] His paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, worked as an executive for a railroad parts company in Columbus, Ohio,[4] and his maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, led Wall Street investment bank W. A. Harriman & Co.[5] Bush was named after his maternal grandfather, who was known as "Pop", and young Bush was called "Poppy" as a tribute to his namesake.[6] The Bush family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut in 1925, and Prescott took a position with W. A. Harriman & Co. (which later merged into Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.) the following year.[7]
+Bush spent most of his childhood in Greenwich, at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine,[b] or at his maternal grandparents' plantation in South Carolina.[9] Because of the family's wealth, Bush was largely unaffected by the Great Depression, a major economic downturn that led to high levels of unemployment for much of the 1930s.[10] He attended Greenwich Country Day School from 1929 to 1937[11] and Phillips Academy, an elite private academy in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1937 to 1942.[12] While at Phillips Academy, he served as president of the senior class, secretary of the student council, president of the community fund-raising group, a member of the editorial board of the school newspaper, and captain of the varsity baseball and soccer teams.[13]
+On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, marking the start of U.S. participation in World War II. On his 18th birthday, immediately after graduating from Phillips Academy, he enlisted in the United States Navy as a naval aviator.[14] After a period of training, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi on June 9, 1943, becoming one of the youngest aviators in the Navy.[15][c] Beginning in 1944, Bush served in the Pacific theater of World War II, where he flew a Grumman TBF Avenger, a torpedo bomber capable of taking off from aircraft carriers.[20] His squadron was assigned to the USS San Jacinto as a member of Air Group 51, where his lanky physique earned him the nickname "Skin".[21]
+Bush flew his first combat mission in May 1944, bombing Japanese-held Wake Island,[22] and was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade) on August 1, 1944. During an attack on a Japanese installation in Chichijima, Bush's aircraft successfully attacked several targets, but was downed by enemy fire.[19] Though both of Bush's fellow crew members died, Bush successfully bailed out from the aircraft and was rescued by the USS Finback.[23][d] Several of the aviators shot down during the attack were captured and executed, and their livers were eaten by their captors.[24] Bush's near-death experience shaped him profoundly, leading him to ask, "Why had I been spared and what did God have for me?"[25] He was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his role in the mission.[26]
+Bush returned to San Jacinto in November 1944, participating in operations in the Philippines.[19] In early 1945, he was assigned to a new combat squadron, VT-153, where he trained to take part in an invasion of mainland Japan. On September 2, 1945, before any invasion took place, Japan formally surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[27] Bush was released from active duty that same month, but was not formally discharged from the navy until October 1955, at which point he had reached the rank of lieutenant.[19] By the end of his period of active service, Bush had flown 58 missions, completed 128 carrier landings, and recorded 1228 hours of flight time.[28]
+Bush met Barbara Pierce at a Christmas dance in Greenwich in December 1941,[29] and, after a period of courtship, they became engaged in December 1943.[30] While Bush was on leave from the navy, they married in Rye, New York, on January 6, 1945.[31] The Bushes enjoyed a strong marriage, and Barbara would later be a popular First Lady, seen by many as "a kind of national grandmother".[32][e] The marriage produced six children: George W. (b. 1946), Robin (b. 1949), Jeb (b. 1953), Neil (b. 1955), Marvin (b. 1956), and Doro (b. 1959).[14] Their oldest daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.[35]
+Following the end of World War II, Bush enrolled at Yale University, where he took part in an accelerated program that enabled him to graduate in two and a half years rather than the usual four.[14] He was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and was elected its president.[36] He also captained the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series as a left-handed first baseman.[37] Like his father, he was a member of the Yale cheerleading squad[38] and was initiated into the Skull and Bones secret society. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in economics and minoring in sociology.[39]
+After graduating from Yale, Bush moved his young family to West Texas. Biographer Jon Meacham writes that Bush's relocation to Texas allowed him to move out of the "daily shadow of his Wall Street father and Grandfather Walker, two dominant figures in the financial world", but would still allow Bush to "call on their connections if he needed to raise capital."[40] His first position in Texas was an oil field equipment salesman[41] for Dresser Industries, which was led by family friend Neil Mallon.[42] While working for Dresser, Bush lived in various places with his family: Odessa, Texas; Ventura, Bakersfield and Compton, California; and Midland, Texas.[43] In 1952, he volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. That same year, his father won election to represent Connecticut in the United States Senate as a member of the Republican Party.[44]
+With support from Mallon and Bush's uncle, George Herbert Walker Jr., Bush and John Overbey launched the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company in 1951.[45] In 1953 he co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas.[46] In 1954, he was named president of the Zapata Offshore Company, a subsidiary which specialized in offshore drilling.[47] Shortly after the subsidiary became independent in 1959, Bush moved the company and his family from Midland to Houston.[48] In Houston, he befriended James Baker, a prominent attorney who later became an important political ally.[49] Bush remained involved with Zapata until the mid-1960s, when he sold his stock in the company for approximately $1 million.[50] In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this allegation.[51]
+By the early 1960s, Bush was widely regarded as an appealing political candidate, and some leading Democrats attempted to convince Bush to become a Democrat. He declined to leave the Republican Party, later citing his belief that the national Democratic Party favored "big, centralized government". The Democratic Party had historically dominated Texas, but Republicans scored their first major victory in the state with John G. Tower's victory in a 1961 special election to the United States Senate. Motivated by Tower's victory, and hoping to prevent the far-right John Birch Society from coming to power, Bush ran for the chairmanship of the Harris County, Texas Republican Party, winning election in February 1963.[52] Like most other Texas Republicans, Bush supported conservative Senator Barry Goldwater over the more centrist Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican Party presidential primaries.[53]
+In 1964, Bush sought to unseat liberal Democrat Ralph W. Yarborough in Texas's U.S. Senate election.[54] Bolstered by superior fundraising, Bush won the Republican primary by defeating former gubernatorial nominee Jack Cox in a run-off election. In the general election, Bush attacked Yarborough's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial and gender discrimination in public institutions and in many privately owned businesses. Bush argued that the act unconstitutionally expanded the powers of the federal government, but he was privately uncomfortable with the racial politics of opposing the act.[55] He lost the election 56 percent to 44 percent, though he did run well ahead of Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee.[54] Despite the loss, the New York Times reported that Bush was "rated by political friend and foe alike as the Republicans' best prospect in Texas because of his attractive personal qualities and the strong campaign he put up for the Senate".[56]
+In 1966, Bush ran for the United States House of Representatives in Texas's 7th congressional district, a newly redistricted seat in the Greater Houston area. Initial polling showed him trailing his Democratic opponent, Harris County District Attorney Frank Briscoe, but he ultimately won the race with 57 percent of the vote.[57] In an effort to woo potential candidates in the South and Southwest, House Republicans secured Bush an appointment to the powerful United States House Committee on Ways and Means, making Bush the first freshman to serve on the committee since 1904.[58] His voting record in the House was generally conservative. He supported the Nixon administration's Vietnam policies, but broke with Republicans on the issue of birth control, which he supported. He also voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, although it was generally unpopular in his district.[59][60] In 1968, Bush joined several other Republicans in issuing the party's Response to the State of the Union address; Bush's part of the address focused on a call for fiscal responsibility.[61]
+Though most other Texas Republicans supported Ronald Reagan in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries, Bush endorsed Richard Nixon, who went on to win the party's nomination. Nixon considered selecting Bush as his running mate in the 1968 presidential election, but he ultimately chose Spiro Agnew instead. Bush won re-election to the House unopposed, while Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in the presidential election.[62] In 1970, with President Nixon's support, Bush gave up his seat in the House to run for the Senate against Yarborough. Bush easily won the Republican primary, but Yarborough was defeated by the more centrist Lloyd Bentsen in the Democratic primary.[63] Ultimately, Bentsen defeated Bush, taking 53.5 percent of the vote.[64]
+After the 1970 Senate election, Bush accepted a position as a senior adviser to the president, but he convinced Nixon to instead appoint him as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.[65] The position represented Bush's first foray into foreign policy, as well as his first major experiences with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, the two major U.S. rivals in the Cold War.[66] During Bush's tenure, the Nixon administration pursued a policy of détente, seeking to ease tensions with both the Soviet Union and China.[67] Bush's ambassadorship was marked by a defeat on the China question, as the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel the Republic of China and replace it with the People's Republic of China in October 1971.[68] In the 1971 crisis in Pakistan, Bush supported an Indian motion at the UN General Assembly to condemn the Pakistani government of Yahya Khan for waging genocide in East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh), referring to the "tradition which we have supported that the human rights question transcended domestic jurisdiction and should be freely debated".[69] Bush's support for India at the UN put him into conflict with Nixon who was supporting Pakistan, partly because Yahya Khan was a useful intermediary in his attempts to reach out to China and partly because the president was fond of Yahya Khan.[70]
+After Nixon won a landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, he appointed Bush as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).[71][72] In that position, he was charged with fundraising, candidate recruitment, and making appearances on behalf of the party in the media.
+When Agnew was being investigated for corruption, Bush assisted, at the request of Nixon and Agnew, in pressuring John Glenn Beall Jr., the U.S. Senator from Maryland to force his brother, George Beall the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, who was supervising the investigation into Agnew.  Attorney Beall ignored the pressure.[73]
+During Bush's tenure at the RNC, the Watergate scandal emerged into public view; the scandal originated from the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee, but also involved later efforts to cover up the break-in by Nixon and other members of the White House.[74] Bush initially defended Nixon steadfastly, but as Nixon's complicity became clear he focused more on defending the Republican Party.[59]
+Following the resignation of Vice President Agnew in 1973 for a scandal unrelated to Watergate, Bush was considered for the position of vice president, but the appointment instead went to Gerald Ford.[75] After the public release of an audio recording that confirmed that Nixon had plotted to use the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, Bush joined other party leaders in urging Nixon to resign.[76] When Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Bush noted in his diary that "There was an aura of sadness, like somebody died... The [resignation] speech was vintage Nixon—a kick or two at the press—enormous strains. One couldn't help but look at the family and the whole thing and think of his accomplishments and then think of the shame... [President Gerald Ford's swearing-in offered] indeed a new spirit, a new lift."[77]
+Upon his ascension to the presidency, Ford strongly considered Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Nelson Rockefeller for the vacant position of vice president. Ford ultimately chose Nelson Rockefeller, partly because of the publication of a news report claiming that Bush's 1970 campaign had benefited from a secret fund set up by Nixon; Bush was later cleared of any suspicion by a special prosecutor.[78] Bush accepted appointment as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, making the him the de facto ambassador to China.[79] According to biographer Jon Meacham, Bush's time in China convinced him that American engagement abroad was needed to ensure global stability, and that the United States "needed to be visible but not pushy, muscular but not domineering."[80]
+In January 1976, Ford brought Bush back to Washington to become the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), placing him in charge of the CIA.[81] In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, the CIA's reputation had been damaged for its role in various covert operations, and Bush was tasked with restoring the agency's morale and public reputation.[82][f] During Bush's year in charge of the CIA, the U.S. national security apparatus actively supported Operation Condor operations and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.[83][84] Meanwhile, Ford decided to drop Rockefeller from the ticket for the 1976 presidential election; he considered Bush as his running mate, but ultimately chose Bob Dole.[85] In his capacity as DCI, Bush gave national security briefings to Jimmy Carter both as a presidential candidate and as president-elect.[86]
+Bush's tenure at the CIA ended after Carter narrowly defeated Ford in the 1976 presidential election. Out of public office for the first time since the 1960s, Bush became chairman on the Executive Committee of the First International Bank in Houston.[87] He also spent a year as a part-time professor of Administrative Science at Rice University's Jones School of Business,[88] continued his membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, and joined the Trilateral Commission. Meanwhile, he began to lay the groundwork for his candidacy in the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries.[89] In the 1980 Republican primary campaign, Bush would face Ronald Reagan, who was widely regarded as the front-runner, as well as other contenders like Senator Bob Dole, Senator Howard Baker, Texas Governor John Connally, Congressman Phil Crane, and Congressman John B. Anderson.[90]
+Bush's campaign cast him as a youthful, "thinking man's candidate" who would emulate the pragmatic conservatism of President Eisenhower.[91] In the midst of the Soviet–Afghan War, which brought an end to a period of détente, and the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 Americans were taken hostage, the campaign highlighted Bush's foreign policy experience.[92] At the outset of the race, Bush focused heavily on winning the January 21 Iowa caucuses, making 31 visits to the state.[93] Ultimately, he won a close victory Iowa with 31.5% to Reagan's 29.4%. After the win, Bush stated that his campaign was full of momentum, or "the Big Mo",[94] and Reagan reorganized his campaign.[95] Partly in response to the Bush campaign's frequent questioning of Reagan's age (Reagan turned 69 in 1980), the Reagan campaign stepped up attacks on Bush, painting him as an elitist who was not truly committed to conservatism.[96] Prior to the New Hampshire primary, Bush and Reagan agreed to a two-person debate, organized by The Nashua Telegraph but paid for by the Reagan campaign.[95]
+Days before the debate, Reagan announced that he would invite four other candidates to the debate; Bush, who had hoped that the one-on-one debate would allow him to emerge as the main alternative to Reagan in the primaries, refused to debate the other candidate. All six candidates took the stage, but Bush refused to speak in the presence of the other candidates. Ultimately, the other four candidates left the stage and the debate continued, but Bush's refusal to debate anyone other than Reagan badly damaged his campaign in New Hampshire.[97] He ended up decisively losing New Hampshire's primary to Reagan, winning just 23 percent of the vote.[95] Bush revitalized his campaign with a victory in Massachusetts, but lost the next several primaries. As Reagan built up a commanding delegate lead, Bush refused to end his campaign, but the other candidates dropped out of the race.[98] Criticizing his more conservative rival's policy proposals, Bush famously labeled Reagan's supply side-influenced plans for massive tax cuts as "voodoo economics".[99] Though he favored lower taxes, Bush feared that dramatic reductions in taxation would lead to deficits and, in turn, cause inflation.[100]
+After Reagan clinched a majority of delegates in late May, Bush reluctantly dropped out of the race.[101] At the 1980 Republican National Convention, Reagan made the last-minute decision to select Bush as his vice presidential nominee after negotiations with Ford regarding a Reagan-Ford ticket collapsed.[102] Though Reagan had resented many of the Bush campaign's attacks during the primary campaign, and several conservative leaders had actively opposed Bush's nomination, Reagan ultimately decided that Bush's popularity with moderate Republicans made him the best and safest pick.[103] Bush, who had believed his political career might be over following the primaries, eagerly accepted the position and threw himself into campaigning for the Reagan-Bush ticket.[104] The 1980 general election campaign between Reagan and Carter was conducted amid a multitude of domestic concerns and the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, and Reagan sought to focus the race on Carter's handling of the economy.[105] Though the race was widely regarded as a close contest for most of the campaign, Reagan ultimately won over the large majority of undecided voters.[106] Reagan took 50.7 percent of the popular vote and 489 of the 538 electoral votes, while Carter won 41% of the popular vote and John Anderson, running as an independent candidate, won 6.6% of the popular vote.[107]
+As vice president, Bush generally maintained a low profile, recognizing the constitutional limits of the office; he avoided decision-making or criticizing Reagan in any way. This approach helped him earn Reagan's trust, easing tensions left over from their earlier rivalry.[95] Bush also generally enjoyed a good relationship with Reagan staffers, including his close friend Jim Baker, who served as Reagan's initial chief of staff.[108] His understanding of the vice presidency was heavily influenced by Vice President Walter Mondale, who enjoyed a strong relationship with President Carter in part because of his ability to avoid confrontations with senior staff and Cabinet members, and by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's difficult relationship with some members of the White House staff during the Ford administration.[109] The Bushes attended a large number of public and ceremonial events in their positions, including many state funerals, which became a common joke for comedians. As the President of the Senate, Bush also stayed in contact with members of Congress and kept the president informed on occurrences on Capitol Hill.[95]
+On March 30, 1981, while Bush was in Texas, Reagan was shot and seriously wounded by John Hinckley Jr. Bush immediately flew back from Washington D.C.; when his plane landed, his aides advised him to proceed directly to the White House by helicopter in order to show that the government was still functioning.[95] Bush rejected the idea, as he feared that such a dramatic scene risked giving the impression that he sought to usurp Reagan's powers and prerogatives.[110] During Reagan's short period of incapacity, Bush presided over Cabinet meetings, met with congressional leaders and foreign leaders, and briefed reporters, but he consistently rejected the possibility of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment.[111] Bush's handling of the attempted assassination and its aftermath made a positive impression on Reagan, who recovered and returned to work within two weeks of the shooting. From then on, the two men would have regular Thursday lunches in the Oval Office.[112]
+Bush was assigned by Reagan to chair two special task forces, one on deregulation and one on international drug smuggling. Both were popular issues with conservatives, and Bush, largely a moderate, began courting them through his work. The deregulation task force reviewed hundreds of rules, making specific recommendations on which ones to amend or revise, in order to curb the size of the federal government.[95] The Reagan administration's deregulation push had a strong impact on broadcasting, finance, resource extraction, and other economic activities, and the administration eliminated numerous government positions.[113] Bush also oversaw the administration's national security crisis management organization, which had traditionally been the responsibility of the National Security Advisor.[114] In 1983, Bush toured Western Europe as part of the Reagan administration's ultimately successful efforts to convince skeptical NATO allies to support the deployment of Pershing II missiles.[115]
+Reagan's approval ratings fell after his first year in office, but they bounced back when the United States began to emerge from recession in 1983.[116] Former Vice President Walter Mondale was nominated by the Democratic Party in the 1984 presidential election. Down in the polls, Mondale selected Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate in hopes of galvanizing support for his campaign, thus making Ferraro the first female major party vice presidential nominee in U.S. history.[117] She and Bush squared off in a single televised vice presidential debate.[95] Public opinion polling consistently showed a Reagan lead in the 1984 campaign, and Mondale was unable to shake up the race.[118] In the end, Reagan won re-election, winning 49 of 50 states and receiving 59% of the popular vote to Mondale's 41%.[119]
+Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union in 1985; less ideologically rigid than his predecessors, Gorbachev believed that the Soviet Union urgently needed economic and political reforms.[120] At the 1987 Washington Summit, Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which committed both signatories to the total abolition of their respective short-range and medium-range missile stockpiles.[121] The treaty marked the beginning of a new era of trade, openness, and cooperation between the two powers.[122] Though President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz took the lead in these negotiations, Bush sat in on many meetings and promised Gorbachev that he would seek to continue improving Soviet-U.S. relations if he succeeded Reagan.[123] On July 13, 1985, Bush became the first vice president to serve as acting president when Reagan underwent surgery to remove polyps from his colon; Bush served as the acting president for approximately eight hours.[124]
+In 1986, the Reagan administration was shaken by a scandal when it was revealed that administration officials had secretly arranged weapon sales to Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. The officials had used the proceeds to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, which was a direct violation of law.[95] When news of affair broke to the media, Bush, like Reagan, stated that he had been "out of the loop" and unaware of the diversion of funds, although this has assertion has since been challenged.[125] Biographer Jon Meacham writes that "no evidence was ever produced proving Bush was aware of the diversion to the contras," but he criticizes Bush's "out of the loop" characterization, writing that the "record is clear that Bush was aware that the United States, in contravention of its own stated policy, was trading arms for hostages".[126] The Iran–Contra scandal, as it became known, did serious damage to the Reagan presidency, raising questions about Reagan's competency.[127] Congress established the Tower Commission to investigate the scandal, and, at Reagan's request, a panel of federal judges appointed Lawrence Walsh as a special prosecutor charged with investigating the Iran–Contra scandal.[128] The investigations continued after Reagan left office and, though Bush was never charged with a crime, the Iran–Contra scandal would remain a political liability for him.[129]
+Bush began planning for a presidential run after the 1984 election, and he officially entered the 1988 Republican Party presidential primaries in October 1987.[95] He put together a campaign led by Reagan staffer Lee Atwater, and which also included his son, George W. Bush, and media consultant Roger Ailes.[130] Though he had moved to the right during his time as vice president, endorsing a Human Life Amendment and repudiating his earlier comments on "voodoo economics," Bush still faced opposition from many conservatives in the Republican Party.[131] His major rivals for the Republican nomination were Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, and Christian televangelist Pat Robertson.[132] Reagan did not publicly endorse any candidate, but he privately expressed support for Bush.[133]
+Though considered the early front-runner for the nomination, Bush came in third in the Iowa caucus, behind Dole and Robertson.[134] Much as Reagan had done in 1980, Bush reorganized his staff and concentrated on the New Hampshire primary.[95] With help from Governor John H. Sununu and an effective campaign attacking Dole for raising taxes, Bush overcame an initial polling deficit and won New Hampshire with 39 percent of the vote.[135] After Bush won South Carolina and 16 of the 17 states holding a primary on Super Tuesday, his competitors dropped out of the race.[136]
+Bush, occasionally criticized for his lack of eloquence when compared to Reagan, delivered a well-received speech at the Republican convention. Known as the "thousand points of light" speech, it described Bush's vision of America: he endorsed the Pledge of Allegiance, prayer in schools, capital punishment, and gun rights.[137] Bush also pledged that he would not raise taxes, stating: "Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And all I can say to them is: read my lips. No new taxes."[138] Bush selected little-known Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. Though Quayle had compiled an unremarkable record in Congress, he was popular among many conservatives, and the campaign hoped that Quayle's youth would appeal to younger voters.[139]
+Meanwhile, the Democratic Party nominated Governor Michael Dukakis, who was known for presiding over an economic turnaround in Massachusetts.[140] Leading in the general election polls against Bush, Dukakis ran an ineffective, low-risk campaign.[141] The Bush campaign attacked Dukakis as an unpatriotic liberal extremist and seized on Dukakis's pardon of Willie Horton, a convicted felon from Massachusetts who had raped a woman while on a prison furlough. The Bush campaign charged that Dukakis presided over a "revolving door" that allowed dangerous convicted felons to leave prison.[142] Dukakis damaged his own campaign with a widely mocked ride in an M1 Abrams tank and a poor performance at the second presidential debate.[143] Bush also attacked Dukakis for opposing a law that would require all students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.[137] The election is widely considered to have had a high level of negative campaigning, though political scientist John Geer has argued that the share of negative ads was in line with previous presidential elections.[144]
+Bush defeated Dukakis by a margin of 426 to 111 in the Electoral College, and he took 53.4 percent of the national popular vote.[145] Bush ran well in all the major regions of the country, but especially in the South.[146] He became the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, the first person to succeed a president from his own party via election since Herbert Hoover in 1929.[95][g] In the concurrent congressional elections, Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.[148]
+Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 1989, succeeding Ronald Reagan. In his inaugural address, Bush said:
+I come before you and assume the Presidency at a moment rich with promise. We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree. A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on. There is new ground to be broken, and new action to be taken.[149]
+Bush's first major appointment was that of James Baker as Secretary of State.[150] Leadership of the Department of Defense went to Dick Cheney, who had had previously served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff and would later serve as vice president under George W. Bush.[151] Jack Kemp joined the administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, while Elizabeth Dole, the wife of Bob Dole and a former Secretary of Transportation, became the Secretary of Labor under Bush.[152] Bush retained several Reagan officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos.[153] New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, a strong supporter of Bush during the 1988 campaign, became chief of staff.[150] Brent Scowcroft was appointed as the National Security Advisor, a role he had also held under Ford.[154]
+During the first year of his tenure, Bush pursued what Soviets referred to as the pauza, a break in Reagan's détente policies.[155] Bush and his advisers were initially divided on Gorbachev; some administration officials saw him as a democratic reformer, but others suspected him of trying to make the minimum changes necessary to restore the Soviet Union to a competitive position with the United States.[156] In 1989, Communist governments fell in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the governments of Bulgaria and Romania instituted major reforms, and the government of East Germany opened the Berlin Wall, which was subsequently demolished by Berliners.[157] Many Soviet leaders urged Gorbachev to crush the dissidents in Eastern Europe, but Gorbachev declined to send in the Soviet military, effectively abandoning the Brezhnev Doctrine.[158] The U.S. was not directly involved in these upheavals, but the Bush administration avoided the appearance of gloating over the demise of the Eastern Bloc to avoid undermining further democratic reforms.[157] Bush also helped convince Polish leaders to allow democratic elections and became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hungary.[159]
+By mid-1989, as unrest blanketed Eastern Europe, Bush requested a meeting with Gorbachev, and the two agreed to hold the December 1989 Malta Summit.[158] Though many on the right remained wary of Gorbachev, Bush came away from the Malta Summit with the belief that Gorbachev would negotiate in good faith.[160] For the remainder of his term, Bush sought cooperative relations with Gorbachev, believing that the Soviet leader was the key to peacefully ending the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.[161] The key issue at the Malta Summit was the potential reunification of Germany.[162] While Britain and France were wary of a re-unified Germany, Bush joined West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in pushing for German reunification.[163] Bush believed that a reunified Germany would serve U.S. interests, but he also saw reunification as providing a final symbolic end to World War II.[164] After extensive negotiations, Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to be a part of NATO, and Germany officially reunified in October 1990.[165]
+Though Gorbachev acquiesced to the democratization of Soviet satellite states, he suppressed nationalist movements within the Soviet Union itself.[166] A crisis in Lithuania left Bush in a difficult position, as he needed Gorbachev's cooperation in the reunification of Germany and feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union could leave nuclear arms in dangerous hands. The Bush administration mildly protested Gorbachev's suppression of Lithuania's independence movement, but took no action to directly intervene.[167] Bush warned independence movements of the disorder that could come with secession from the Soviet Union; in a 1991 address that critics labeled the "Chicken Kiev speech", he cautioned against "suicidal nationalism".[168] In July 1991, Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) treaty, in which both countries agreed to cut their strategic nuclear weapons by 30 percent.[169]
+In August 1991, hard-line Communists launched a coup against Gorbachev; while the coup quickly fell apart, it broke the remaining power of Gorbachev and the central Soviet government.[170] Later that month, Gorbachev resigned as general secretary of the Communist party, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin ordered the seizure of Soviet property. Gorbachev clung to power as the President of the Soviet Union until December 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.[171] Fifteen states emerged from the Soviet Union, and of those states, Russia was the largest and most populous. Bush and Yeltsin met in February 1992, declaring a new era of "friendship and partnership".[172] In January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin agreed to START II, which provided for further nuclear arms reductions on top of the original START treaty.[173] The collapse of the Soviet Union prompted reflections on the future of the world following the end of the Cold War; one political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, speculated that humanity had reached the "end of history" in that liberal, capitalist democracy had permanently triumphed over Communism and fascism.[174] Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments led to post-Soviet conflicts in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa that would continue long after Bush left office.[175]
+During the 1980s, the U.S. had provided aid to Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, an anti-Communist dictator who engaged in drug trafficking. In May 1989, Noriega annulled the results of a democratic presidential election in which Guillermo Endara had been elected. Bush objected to the annulment of the election and worried about the status of the Panama Canal with Noriega still in office.[176] Bush dispatched 2,000 soldiers to the country, where they began conducting regular military exercises in violation of prior treaties.[177] After a U.S. serviceman was shot by Panamanian forces in December 1989, Bush ordered the United States invasion of Panama, known as "Operation Just Cause". The invasion was the first large-scale American military operation in more than 40 years that was not related to the Cold War. American forces quickly took control of the Panama Canal Zone and Panama City. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990, and was quickly transported to a prison in the United States. Twenty-three Americans died in the operation, while another 394 were wounded. Noriega was convicted and imprisoned on racketeering and drug trafficking charges in April 1992.[176] Historian Stewart Brewer argues that the invasion "represented a new era in American foreign policy" because Bush did not justify the invasion under the Monroe Doctrine or the threat of Communism, but rather on the grounds that it was in the best interests of the United States.[178]
+Faced with massive debts and low oil prices in the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein decided to conquer the country of Kuwait, a small, oil-rich country situated on Iraq's southern border.[179] After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush imposed economic sanctions on Iraq and assembled a multi-national coalition opposed to the invasion.[180] The administration feared that a failure to respond to the invasion would embolden Hussein to attack Saudi Arabia or Israel, and wanted to discourage other countries from similar aggression.[181] Bush also wanted to ensure continued access to oil, as Iraq and Kuwait collectively accounted for 20 percent of the world's oil production, and Saudi Arabia produced another 26 percent of the world's oil supply.[182]
+At Bush's insistence, in November 1990, the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution authorizing the use of force if Iraq did not withdrawal from Kuwait by January 15, 1991.[183] Gorbachev's support, as well as China's abstention, helped ensure passage of the UN resolution.[184] Bush convinced Britain, France, and other nations to commit soldiers to an operation against Iraq, and he won important financial backing from Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.[185] In January 1991, Bush asked Congress to approve a joint resolution authorizing a war against Iraq.[186] Bush believed that the UN resolution had already provided him with the necessary authorization to launch a military operation against Iraq, but he wanted to show that the nation was united behind a military action.[187] Despite the opposition of a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991.[186]
+After the January 15 deadline passed without an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, U.S. and coalition forces began a conducted a bombing campaign that devastated Iraq's power grid and communications network, and resulted in the desertion of about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers. In retaliation, Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia, but most of the missiles did little damage. On February 23, coalition forces began a ground invasion into Kuwait, evicting Iraqi forces by the end of February 27. About 300 Americans, as well as approximately 65 soldiers from other coalition nations, died during the military action.[188] A cease fire was arranged on March 3, and the UN passed a resolution establishing a peacekeeping force in a demilitarized zone between Kuwait and Iraq.[189] A March 1991 Gallup poll showed that Bush had an approval rating of 89 percent, the highest presidential approval rating in the history of Gallup polling.[190] After 1991, the UN maintained economic sanctions against Iraq, and the United Nations Special Commission was assigned to ensure that Iraq did not revive its weapons of mass destruction program.[191]
+In 1987, the U.S. and Canada had reached a free trade agreement that eliminated many tariffs between the two countries. President Reagan had intended it as the first step towards a larger trade agreement to eliminate most tariffs among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.[192] The Bush administration, along with the Progressive Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, spearheaded the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. In addition to lowering tariffs, the proposed treaty would affected patents, copyrights, and trademarks.[193] In 1991, Bush sought fast track authority, which grants the president the power to submit an international trade agreement to Congress without the possibility of amendment. Despite congressional opposition led by House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, both houses of Congress voted to grant Bush fast track authority. NAFTA was signed in December 1992, after Bush lost re-election,[194] but President Clinton won ratification of NAFTA in 1993.[195] NAFTA remains controversial for its impact on wages, jobs, and overall economic growth.[196]
+The U.S. economy had generally performed well since emerging from recession in late 1982, but it slipped into a mild recession in 1990. The unemployment rate rose from 5.9 percent in 1989 to a high of 7.8 percent in mid-1991.[197][198] Large federal deficits, spawned during the Reagan years, rose from $152.1 billion in 1989[199] to $220 billion for 1990;[200] the $220 billion deficit represented a threefold increase since 1980.[201] As the public became increasingly concerned about the economy and other domestic affairs, Bush's well-received handling of foreign affairs became less of an issue for most voters.[202] Bush's top domestic priority was to bring an end to federal budget deficits, which he saw as a liability for the country's long-term economic health and standing in the world.[203] As he was opposed to major defense spending cuts[204] and had pledged to not raise taxes, the president had major difficulties in balancing the budget.[205]
+Bush and congressional leaders agreed to avoid major changes to the budget for fiscal year 1990, which began in October 1989. However, both sides knew that spending cuts or new taxes would be necessary in the following year's budget in order to avoid the draconian automatic domestic spending cuts required by the Gramm–Rudman–Hollings Balanced Budget Act of 1987.[206] Bush and other leaders also wanted to cut deficits because Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan refused to lower interest rates, and thus stimulate economic growth, unless the federal budget deficit was reduced.[207] In a statement released in late June 1990, Bush said that he would be open to a deficit reduction program which included spending cuts, incentives for economic growth, budget process reform, as well as tax increases.[208] To fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party, Bush's statement represented a betrayal, and they heavily criticized him for compromising so early in the negotiations.[209]
+In September 1990, Bush and Congressional Democrats announced a compromise to cut funding for mandatory and discretionary programs while also raising revenue, partly through a higher gas tax. The compromise additionally included a "pay as you go" provision that required that new programs be paid for at the time of implementation.[210] House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich led the conservative opposition to the bill, strongly opposing any form of tax increase.[211] Some liberals also criticized the budget cuts in the compromise, and in October, the House rejected the deal, resulting in a brief government shutdown. Without the strong backing of the Republican Party, Bush agreed to another compromise bill, this one more favorable to Democrats. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA-90), enacted on October 27, 1990, dropped much of the gasoline tax increase in favor of higher income taxes on top earners. It included cuts to domestic spending, but the cuts were not as deep as those that had been proposed in the original compromise. Bush's decision to sign the bill damaged his standing with conservatives and the general public, but it also laid the groundwork for the budget surpluses of the late 1990s.[212]
+-Bush's remarks at the signing ceremony for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990[213]
+The disabled had not received legal protections under the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many faced discrimination and segregation by the time Bush took office. In 1988, Lowell P. Weicker Jr. and Tony Coelho had introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act, which barred employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities. The bill had passed the Senate but not the House, and it was reintroduced in 1989. Though some conservatives opposed the bill due to its costs and potential burdens on businesses, Bush strongly supported it, partly because his son, Neil, had struggled with dyslexia. After the bill passed both houses of Congress, Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 into law in July 1990.[214] The act required employers and public accommodations to make "reasonable accommodations" for the disabled, while providing an exception when such accommodations imposed an "undue hardship".[215]
+Senator Ted Kennedy later led the congressional passage of a separate civil rights bill designed to facilitate launching employment discrimination lawsuits.[216] In vetoing the bill, Bush argued that it would lead to racial quotas in hiring.[217][218] In November 1991, Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which was largely similar to the bill he had vetoed in the previous year.[216]
+In August 1990, Bush signed the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded program dedicated to assisting persons living with HIV/AIDS.[219] Throughout his presidency, the AIDS epidemic grew dramatically in the U.S. and around the world, and Bush often found himself at odds with AIDS activist groups who criticized him for not placing a high priority on HIV/AIDS research and funding. Frustrated by the administration's lack of urgency on the issue, ACT UP, dumped the ashes of HIV/AIDS victims on the White House lawn during a viewing of the AIDS Quilt in 1992.[220] By that time, HIV had become the leading cause of death in the U.S. for men aged 25–44.[221]
+In June 1989, the Bush administration proposed a bill to amend the Clean Air Act. Working with Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, the administration won passage of the amendments over the opposition of business-aligned members of Congress who feared the impact of tougher regulations.[222] The legislation sought to curb acid rain and smog by requiring decreased emissions of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide,[223] and was the first major update to the Clean Air Act since 1977.[224] Bush also signed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. However, the League of Conservation Voters criticized some of Bush's other environmental actions, including his opposition to stricter auto-mileage standards.[225]
+President Bush devoted attention to voluntary service as a means of solving some of America's most serious social problems. He often used the "thousand points of light" theme to describe the power of citizens to solve community problems. In his 1989 inaugural address, President Bush said, "I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good."[226] During his presidency, Bush honored numerous volunteers with the Daily Point of Light Award, a tradition that was continued by his presidential successors.[227] In 1990, the Points of Light Foundation was created as a nonprofit organization in Washington to promote this spirit of volunteerism.[228] In 2007, the Points of Light Foundation merged with the Hands On Network to create a new organization, Points of Light.[229]
+Bush appointed two justices to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1990, Bush appointed a largely unknown state appellate judge, David Souter, to replace liberal icon William Brennan.[230] Souter was easily confirmed and served until 2009, but joined the liberal bloc of the court, disappointing Bush.[230] In 1991, Bush nominated conservative federal judge Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall, a long-time liberal stalwart. Thomas, the former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), faced heavy opposition in the Senate, as well as from pro-choice groups and the NAACP. His nomination faced another difficulty when Anita Hill accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her during his time as the chair of EEOC. Thomas won confirmation in a narrow 52–48 vote; 43 Republicans and 9 Democrats voted to confirm Thomas's nomination, while 46 Democrats and 2 Republicans voted against confirmation.[231] Thomas became one of the most conservative justices of his era.[232] In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 42 judges to the United States courts of appeals, and 148 judges to the United States district courts. Among these appointments were future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as well as Vaughn R. Walker, who was later revealed to be the earliest known gay federal judge.[233]
+Bush's education platform consisted mainly of offering federal support for a variety of innovations, such as open enrollment, incentive pay for outstanding teachers, and rewards for schools that improve performance with underprivileged children.[234] Though Bush did not pass a major educational reform package during his presidency, his ideas influenced later reform efforts, including Goals 2000 and the No Child Left Behind Act.[235] Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990,[236] which led to a 40 percent increase in legal immigration to the United States.[237] The act more than doubled the number of visas given to immigrants on the basis of job skills.[238] In the wake of the savings and loan crisis, Bush proposed a $50 billion package to rescue the savings and loans industry, and also proposed the creation of the Office of Thrift Supervision to regulate the industry. Congress passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, which incorporated most of Bush's proposals.[239]
+Bush was widely seen as a "pragmatic caretaker" president who lacked a unified and compelling long-term theme in his efforts.[240][241][242] Indeed, Bush's sound bite where he refers to the issue of overarching purpose as "the vision thing" has become a metonym applied to other political figures accused of similar difficulties.[243][244][245][246][247][248] His ability to gain broad international support for the Gulf War and the war's result were seen as both a diplomatic and military triumph,[249] rousing bipartisan approval,[250] though his decision to withdraw without removing Saddam Hussein left mixed feelings, and attention returned to the domestic front and a souring economy.[251] A New York Times article mistakenly depicted Bush as being surprised to see a supermarket barcode reader;[252][253] the report of his reaction exacerbated the notion that he was "out of touch".[252] Amid the early 1990s recession, his image shifted from "conquering hero" to "politician befuddled by economic matters".[254]
+Bush announced his reelection bid in early 1992; with a coalition victory in the Persian Gulf War and high approval ratings, Bush's reelection initially looked likely.[255] As a result, many leading Democrats, including Mario Cuomo, Dick Gephardt, and Al Gore, declined to seek their party's presidential nomination.[256] However, Bush's tax increase had angered many conservatives, who believed that Bush had strayed from the conservative principles of Ronald Reagan.[257] He faced a challenge from conservative political columnist Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primaries.[258] Bush fended off Buchanan's challenge and won his party's nomination at the 1992 Republican National Convention, but the convention adopted a socially conservative platform strongly influenced by the Christian right.[259]
+Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. A moderate who was affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Clinton favored welfare reform, deficit reduction, and a tax cut for the middle class.[260] In early 1992, the race took an unexpected twist when Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot launched a third party bid, claiming that neither Republicans nor Democrats could eliminate the deficit and make government more efficient. His message appealed to voters across the political spectrum disappointed with both parties' perceived fiscal irresponsibility.[261] Perot also attacked NAFTA, which he claimed would lead to major job losses.[262] National polling taken in mid-1992 showed Perot in the lead, but Clinton experienced a surge through effective campaigning and the selection of Senator Al Gore, a popular and relatively young Southerner, as his running mate.[263]
+Clinton won the election, taking 43 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes, while Bush won 37.5 percent of the popular vote and 168 electoral votes.[264] Perot won 19% of the popular vote, one of the highest totals for a third party candidate in U.S. history, drawing equally from both major candidates, according to exit polls.[265] Clinton performed well in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast, while also waging the strongest Democratic campaign in the South since the 1976 election.[266] Several factors were important in Bush's defeat. The ailing economy which arose from recession may have been the main factor in Bush's loss, as 7 in 10 voters said on election day that the economy was either "not so good" or "poor".[267][268] On the eve of the 1992 election, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8%, which was the highest it had been since 1984.[269] The president was also damaged by his alienation of many conservatives in his party.[270] Bush blamed Perot in part for his defeat, though exit polls showed that Perot drew his voters about equally from Clinton and Bush.[271]
+Despite his defeat, Bush left office with a 56 percent job approval rating in January 1993.[272] Like many of his predecessors, Bush issued a series of pardons during his last days in office. In December 1992, he granted executive clemency to six former senior government officials implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, most prominently former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.[273] The pardons effectively brought an end to special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal.[274]
+After leaving office, Bush and his wife built a retirement house in the community of West Oaks, Houston.[275] He established a presidential office within the Park Laureate Building on Memorial Drive in Houston.[276] He also frequently spent time at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, took annual cruises in Greece, went on fishing trips in Florida, and visited the Bohemian Club in Northern California. He declined to serve on corporate boards, but delivered numerous paid speeches and served as an adviser to The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm.[277] He never published his memoirs, but he and Brent Scowcroft co-wrote A World Transformed, a 1999 work on foreign policy. Portions of his letters and his diary were later published as The China Diary of George H. W. Bush and All The Best, George Bush.[278]
+During a 1993 visit to Kuwait, Bush was targeted in an assassination plot directed by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. President Clinton retaliated when he ordered the firing of 23 cruise missiles at Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad.[279] Bush did not publicly comment on the assassination attempt or the missile strike, but privately spoke with Clinton shortly before the strike took place.[280] In the 1994 gubernatorial elections, his sons George W. and Jeb concurrently ran for Governor of Texas and Governor of Florida. Concerning their political careers, he advised them both that "[a]t some point both of you may want to say 'Well, I don't agree with my Dad on that point' or 'Frankly I think Dad was wrong on that.' Do it. Chart your own course, not just on the issues but on defining yourselves".[281] George W. won his race against Ann Richards while Jeb lost to Lawton Chiles. After the results came in, the elder Bush told ABC, "I have very mixed emotions. Proud father, is the way I would sum it all up."[282] Jeb would again run for governor of Florida in 1998 and win at the same time that his brother George W. won re-election in Texas. It marked the second time in United States history that a pair of brothers served simultaneously as governors.[283]
+Bush supported his son's candidacy in the 2000 presidential election, but did not actively campaign in the election and did not deliver a speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention.[284] George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the 2000 election and was re-elected in 2004. Bush and his son thus became the second father–son pair to each serve as President of the United States, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.[285] Through previous administrations, the elder Bush had ubiquitously been known as "George Bush" or "President Bush", but following his son's election the need to distinguish between them has made retronymic forms such as "George H. W. Bush" and "George Bush Sr." and colloquialisms such as "Bush 41" and "Bush the Elder" more common.[286] Bush advised his son on some personnel choices, approving of the selection of Dick Cheney as running mate and the retention of George Tenet as CIA Director. However, he was not consulted on all appointments, including that of his old rival, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense.[287] Though he avoided giving unsolicited advice to his son, Bush and his son also discussed some matters of policy, especially regarding national security issues.[288]
+In his retirement, Bush generally avoided publicly expressing his opinion on political issues, instead using the public spotlight to support various charities.[289] Despite earlier political differences with Bill Clinton, the two former presidents eventually became friends.[290] They appeared together in television ads, encouraging aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.[291]
+Bush supported Republican John McCain in the 2008 presidential election,[292] and Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election,[293] but both were defeated by Democrat Barack Obama. In 2011, Obama awarded Bush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.[294]
+Bush supported his son Jeb's bid in the 2016 presidential election.[295] Jeb Bush's campaign struggled however, and he withdrew from the race during the primaries. Neither George H.W. nor George W. Bush endorsed the eventual Republican nominee, Donald Trump;[296] all three Bushes emerged as frequent critics of Trump's policies and speaking style, while Trump frequently criticized George W. Bush's presidency. George H. W. Bush later said that he voted for the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the general election.[297] After the election, Bush wrote a letter to president-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 to inform him that because of his poor health, he would not be able to attend Trump's inauguration on January 20; he gave him his best wishes.[298]
+In August 2017, after the violence at Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, both Presidents Bush released a joint statement saying, "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms," the statement from presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush reads. "As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights."[299][300]
+On April 17, 2018, Bush's wife Former First Lady Barbara Bush died at the age of 92,[301] at her home in Houston, Texas. Her funeral was held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston four days later.[302][303] Bush along with former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush (son), Bill Clinton and fellow First Ladies Melania Trump, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush (daughter-in-law) and Hillary Clinton were representatives who attended the funeral and who also took a photo together after the service as a sign of unity which went viral online.[304][305]
+On November 1, Bush went to the polls to vote early in the midterm elections. This would be his final public appearance.[306]
+George H. W. Bush died on November 30, 2018, aged 94 years, 171 days,[307] at his home in Houston.[308] At the time of his death he was the longest-lived U.S. president,[309] a distinction now held by Jimmy Carter.[310] He was also the third-oldest vice president.[h] Bush lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from December 3 through December 5; he was the 12th U.S. president to be accorded this honor.[312][313] Then, on December 5, Bush's casket was transferred from the Capitol rotunda to Washington National Cathedral where a state funeral was held.[314] After the funeral, Bush's body was transported to George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he was buried next to his wife Barbara and daughter Robin.[315] At the funeral, former president George W. Bush eulogized his father saying,
+"He looked for the good in each person, and he usually found it."[314]
+In 1991, The New York Times revealed that Bush was suffering from Graves' disease, a non-contagious thyroid condition that his wife Barbara also suffered from.[316] Later in life, Bush suffered from vascular parkinsonism, a form of Parkinson's disease which forced him to use a motorized scooter or wheelchair.[317]
+Bush was raised in the Episcopal Church, though by the end of his life his apparent religious beliefs are considered to have more in line with Evangelical Christian doctrine and practices.[318] He cited various moments in his life deepening of his faith, including his escape from Japanese forces in 1944, and the death of his three-year-old daughter Robin in 1953.[319] His faith was reflected in his Thousand Points of Light speech, his support for prayer in schools, and his support for the pro-life movement (following his election as vice president).[318][319]
+Polls of historians and political scientists have ranked Bush in the top half of presidents. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association's Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked Bush as the 17th best president out of 44.[320] A 2017 C-Span poll of historians also ranked Bush as the 20th best president out of 43.[321] Richard Rose described Bush as a "guardian" president, and many other historians and political scientists have similarly described Bush as a passive, hands-off president who was "largely content with things as they were".[322] Professor Steven Knott writes that "[g]enerally the Bush presidency is viewed as successful in foreign affairs but a disappointment in domestic affairs."[323]
+Biographer Jon Meacham writes that, after he left office, many Americans viewed Bush as "a gracious and underappreciated man who had many virtues but who had failed to project enough of a distinctive identity and vision to overcome the economic challenges of 1991–92 and to win a second term."[324] Bush himself noted that his legacy was "lost between the glory of Reagan ... and the trials and tribulations of my sons."[325] In the 2010s, Bush was fondly remembered for his willingness to compromise, which contrasted with the intensely partisan era that followed his presidency.[326]
+According to USA Today, the legacy of Bush's presidency was defined by his victory over Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait, and for his presiding over the collapse of the USSR and the re-unification of Germany.[327] Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott praise Bush's handling of the USSR, especially how he prodded Gorbachev in terms of releasing control over the satellites and permitting German unification—and especially a united Germany in NATO.[328] Andrew Bacevich judges the Bush administration as “morally obtuse” in the light of its “business-as-usual” attitude towards China after the massacre in Tiananmen Square and its uncritical support of Gorbachev as the Soviet Union disintegrated.[329] David Rothkopf argues:
+In 1990, Time magazine named him the Man of the Year.[331] In 1997, the Houston Intercontinental Airport was renamed as the George Bush Intercontinental Airport.[332] In 1999, the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was named the George Bush Center for Intelligence in his honor.[333] In 2011, Bush, an avid golfer, was inducted in the World Golf Hall of Fame.[334] The USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), the tenth and last Nimitz-class supercarrier of the United States Navy, was named for Bush.[335][336] Bush is commemorated on a postage stamp that was issued by the United States Postal Service in 2019.[337]
+The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the tenth U.S. presidential library, was completed in 1997.[338] It contains the presidential and vice presidential papers of Bush and the vice presidential papers of Dan Quayle.[339] The library is located on a 90-acre (36 ha) site on the west campus of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.[340] Texas A&M University also hosts the Bush School of Government and Public Service, a graduate public policy school.[340]
+Convention
+Primaries
+Convention
+Primaries

en/2179.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,80 @@

+Georges Braque (/brɑːk/; French: [bʁak]; 13 May 1882 – 31 August 1963) was a major 20th-century French painter, collagist, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. His most important contributions to the history of art were in his alliance with Fauvism from 1905, and the role he played in the development of Cubism. Braque's work between 1908 and 1912 is closely associated with that of his colleague Pablo Picasso. Their respective Cubist works were indistinguishable for many years, yet the quiet nature of Braque was partially eclipsed by the fame and notoriety of Picasso.[1]
+Georges Braque was born on 13 May 1882 in Argenteuil, Val-d'Oise. He grew up in Le Havre and trained to be a house painter and decorator like his father and grandfather. However, he also studied artistic painting during evenings at the École des Beaux-Arts, in Le Havre, from about 1897 to 1899. In Paris, he apprenticed with a decorator and was awarded his certificate in 1902. The next year, he attended the Académie Humbert, also in Paris, and painted there until 1904. It was here that he met Marie Laurencin and Francis Picabia.[1]
+Braque's earliest works were impressionistic, but after seeing the work exhibited by the artistic group known as the "Fauves" (Beasts) in 1905, he adopted a Fauvist style. The Fauves, a group that included Henri Matisse and André Derain among others, used brilliant colors to represent emotional response. Braque worked most closely with the artists Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz, who shared Braque's hometown of Le Havre, to develop a somewhat more subdued Fauvist style. In 1906, Braque traveled with Friesz to L'Estaque, to Antwerp, and home to Le Havre to paint.[1]
+In May 1907, he successfully exhibited works of the Fauve style in the Salon des Indépendants. The same year, Braque's style began a slow evolution as he became influenced by Paul Cézanne who had died in 1906 and whose works were exhibited in Paris for the first time in a large-scale, museum-like retrospective in September 1907. The 1907 Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne greatly affected the avant-garde artists of Paris, resulting in the advent of Cubism.
+Braque's paintings of 1908–1912 reflected his new interest in geometry and simultaneous perspective. He conducted an intense study of the effects of light and perspective and the technical means that painters use to represent these effects, seeming to question the most standard of artistic conventions. In his village scenes, for example, Braque frequently reduced an architectural structure to a geometric form approximating a cube, yet rendered its shading so that it looked both flat and three-dimensional by fragmenting the image. He showed this in the painting Houses at l'Estaque.
+Beginning in 1909, Braque began to work closely with Pablo Picasso who had been developing a similar proto-Cubist style of painting. At the time, Pablo Picasso was influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne, African masks and Iberian sculpture while Braque was interested mainly in developing Cézanne's ideas of multiple perspectives. “A comparison of the works of Picasso and Braque during 1908 reveals that the effect of his encounter with Picasso was more to accelerate and intensify Braque’s exploration of Cézanne’s ideas, rather than to divert his thinking in any essential way.”[3] Braque's essential subject is the ordinary objects he has known practically forever. Picasso celebrates animation, while Braque celebrates contemplation.[4] Thus, the invention of Cubism was a joint effort between Picasso and Braque, then residents of Montmartre, Paris. These artists were the style's main innovators. After meeting in October or November 1907,[5] Braque and Picasso, in particular, began working on the development of Cubism in 1908. Both artists produced paintings of monochromatic color and complex patterns of faceted form, now termed Analytic Cubism.
+A decisive time of its development occurred during the summer of 1911,[6] when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso painted side by side in Céret in the French Pyrenees, each artist producing paintings that are difficult—sometimes virtually impossible—to distinguish from those of the other. In 1912, they began to experiment with collage and Braque invented the papier collé technique.[7]
+On 14 November 1908, the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes".[8]
+Vauxcelles, on 25 March 1909, used the terms "bizarreries cubiques" (cubic oddities) after seeing a painting by Braque at the Salon des Indépendants.[9]
+The term 'Cubism', first pronounced in 1911 with reference to artists exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants, quickly gained wide use but Picasso and Braque did not adopt it initially. Art historian Ernst Gombrich described Cubism as "the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture—that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas."[10] The Cubist style spread quickly throughout Paris and then Europe.
+The two artists' productive collaboration continued and they worked closely together until the beginning of World War I in 1914, when Braque enlisted with the French Army. In May 1915, Braque received a severe head injury in battle at Carency and suffered temporary blindness.[11] He was trepanned, and required a long period of recuperation.
+The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain.
+Braque resumed painting in late 1916. Working alone, he began to moderate the harsh abstraction of cubism. He developed a more personal style characterized by brilliant color, textured surfaces, and—after his relocation to the Normandy seacoast—the reappearance of the human figure. He painted many still life subjects during this time, maintaining his emphasis on structure. One example of this is his 1943 work Blue Guitar, which hangs in the Allen Memorial Art Museum.[14] During his recovery he became a close friend of the cubist artist Juan Gris.
+He continued to work during the remainder of his life, producing a considerable number of paintings, graphics, and sculptures. Braque, along with Matisse, is credited for introducing Pablo Picasso to Fernand Mourlot, and most of the lithographs and book illustrations he himself created during the 1940s and '50s were produced at the Mourlot Studios. In 1962 Braque worked with master printmaker Aldo Crommelynck to create his series of etchings and aquatints titled L’Ordre des Oiseaux (The Order of Birds),[15] which was accompanied by the poet Saint-John Perse's text.[16]
+Braque died on 31 August 1963 in Paris. He is buried in the cemetery of the Church of St. Valery in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy whose windows he designed. Braque's work is in most major museums throughout the world.
+Braque believed that an artist experienced beauty "… in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty [he] interpret[s] [his] subjective impression...”[17] He described "objects shattered into fragments… [as] a way of getting closest to the object…Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space”.[18] He adopted a monochromatic and neutral color palette in the belief that such a palette would emphasize the subject matter.
+Although Braque began his career painting landscapes, during 1908 he, alongside Picasso, discovered the advantages of painting still lifes instead. Braque explained that he
+“… began to concentrate on still-lifes, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space… This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them… In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me, long ago, from landscape to still-life”[19] A still life was also more accessible, in relation to perspective, than landscape, and permitted the artist to see the multiple perspectives of the object. Braque's early interest in still lifes revived during the 1930s.
+During the period between the wars, Braque exhibited a freer, more relaxed style of Cubism, intensifying his color use and a looser rendering of objects. However, he still remained committed to the cubist method of simultaneous perspective and fragmentation. In contrast to Picasso, who continuously reinvented his style of painting, producing both representational and cubist images, and incorporating surrealist ideas into his work, Braque continued in the Cubist style, producing luminous, other-worldly still life and figure compositions. By the time of his death in 1963, he was regarded as one of the elder statesmen of the School of Paris, and of modern art.
+On 20 May 2010, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris reported the overnight theft of five paintings from its collection. The paintings taken were Le pigeon aux petits pois (The Pigeon with the Peas) by Pablo Picasso, La Pastorale by Henri Matisse, L'Olivier Près de l'Estaque (Olive Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque, La Femme à l'Éventail [fr] (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani and Nature Morte aux Chandeliers (Still Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Léger and were valued at €100 million ( $123 million USD).[20][21]  A window had been smashed and CCTV footage showed a masked man taking the paintings.[20]  Authorities believe the thief acted alone.[22] The man carefully removed the paintings from their frames, which he left behind.[23]
+Georges Braque, 1908, Plate and Fruit Dish, oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, private collection
+Georges Braque, 1908, Cinq bananes et deux poires (Five Bananas and Two Pears), oil on canvas, 24 x 33 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne
+Georges Braque, 1908, Maisons à l'Estaque (Houses at l'Estaque), oil on canvas, 73 x 59.5 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern
+Georges Braque, 1908–09, Fruit Dish, oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
+Georges Braque, 1909, Port en Normandie (Little Harbor in Normandy), 81.1 x 80.5 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago
+Georges Braque, 1909, La Roche-Guyon, le château (The Castle at Roche-Guyon), oil on canvas, 80 x 59.5 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
+Georges Braque, 1909 (September), Violin and Palette (Violon et palette, Dans l'atelier), oil on canvas, 91.7 x 42.8 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
+Georges Braque, 1909–10, Pitcher and Violin, oil on canvas, 116.8 x 73.2 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel
+Georges Braque, 1910, Femme tenant une Mandoline, 92 x 73 cm, Bavarian State Painting Collections
+Georges Braque, 1910, Portrait of a Woman, Female Figure (Torso Ženy), oil on canvas, 91 x 61 cm, private collection
+Georges Braque, 1911, Nature morte (Still Life), Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, 1912
+Georges Braque, 1911, Nature Morte (The Pedestal Table), oil on canvas, 116.5 x 81.5 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris
+Georges Braque, 1911–12, Girl with a Cross, oil on canvas, 55 x 43 cm, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
+Georges Braque, 1911–12, Man with a Guitar (Figure, L’homme à la guitare), oil on canvas, 116.2 x 80.9 cm (45.75 x 31.9 in), Museum of Modern Art, New York
+Georges Braque, 1912, Violin: "Mozart Kubelick", oil on canvas, 45.7 x 61 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
+Georges Braque, 1913, Nature morte (Fruit Dish, Ace of Clubs), oil, gouache and charcoal on canvas, 81 x 60 cm (31.8 x 23.6 in), Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
+Georges Braque, 1913, Femme à la guitare (Woman with Guitar), oil and charcoal on canvas, 130 × 73 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
+Georges Braque, 1913–14, Still Life on a Table (Duo pour Flute), oil on canvas, 45.7 × 55.2 cm, Lauder Cubist Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
+Georges Braque, 1914, Violon et verre (Violin and Glass), oil, charcoal and pasted paper on canvas, oval, 116 x 81 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel
+Georges Braque, 1914, Man With a Guitar, oil on canvas, 130 x 73 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
+Georges Braque, 1918, Rhum et guitare (Rum and Guitar), oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, Colección Abelló, Madrid

en/218.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,113 @@

+Anatomy (Greek anatomē, 'dissection') is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts.[1] Anatomy is a branch of natural science which deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having its beginnings in prehistoric times.[2] Anatomy is inherently tied to developmental biology, embryology, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology, and phylogeny,[3] as these are the processes by which anatomy is generated, both over immediate and long-term timescales. Anatomy and physiology, which study the structure and function of organisms and their parts respectively, make a natural pair of related disciplines, and are often studied together. Human anatomy is one of the essential basic sciences that are applied in medicine.[4]
+The discipline of anatomy is divided into macroscopic and microscopic. Macroscopic anatomy, or gross anatomy, is the examination of an animal's body parts using unaided eyesight. Gross anatomy also includes the branch of superficial anatomy. Microscopic anatomy involves the use of optical instruments in the study of the tissues of various structures, known as histology, and also in the study of cells.
+The history of anatomy is characterized by a progressive understanding of the functions of the organs and structures of the human body. Methods have also improved dramatically, advancing from the examination of animals by dissection of carcasses and cadavers (corpses) to 20th century medical imaging techniques including X-ray, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging.
+Derived from the Greek ἀνατομή anatomē "dissection" (from ἀνατέμνω anatémnō "I cut up, cut open" from ἀνά aná "up", and τέμνω témnō "I cut"),[5] anatomy is the scientific study of the structure of organisms including their systems, organs and tissues. It includes the appearance and position of the various parts, the materials from which they are composed, their locations and their relationships with other parts. Anatomy is quite distinct from physiology and biochemistry, which deal respectively with the functions of those parts and the chemical processes involved. For example, an anatomist is concerned with the shape, size, position, structure, blood supply and innervation of an organ such as the liver; while a physiologist is interested in the production of bile, the role of the liver in nutrition and the regulation of bodily functions.[6]
+The discipline of anatomy can be subdivided into a number of branches including gross or macroscopic anatomy and microscopic anatomy.[7] Gross anatomy is the study of structures large enough to be seen with the naked eye, and also includes superficial anatomy or surface anatomy, the study by sight of the external body features. Microscopic anatomy is the study of structures on a microscopic scale, along with histology (the study of tissues), and embryology (the study of an organism in its immature condition).[3]
+Anatomy can be studied using both invasive and non-invasive methods with the goal of obtaining information about the structure and organization of organs and systems.[3] Methods used include dissection, in which a body is opened and its organs studied, and endoscopy, in which a video camera-equipped instrument is inserted through a small incision in the body wall and used to explore the internal organs and other structures. Angiography using X-rays or magnetic resonance angiography are methods to visualize blood vessels.[8][9][10][11]
+The term "anatomy" is commonly taken to refer to human anatomy. However, substantially the same structures and tissues are found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom and the term also includes the anatomy of other animals. The term zootomy is also sometimes used to specifically refer to non-human animals. The structure and tissues of plants are of a dissimilar nature and they are studied in plant anatomy.[6]
+The kingdom Animalia contains multicellular organisms that are heterotrophic and motile (although some have secondarily adopted a sessile lifestyle). Most animals have bodies differentiated into separate tissues and these animals are also known as eumetazoans. They have an internal digestive chamber, with one or two openings; the gametes are produced in multicellular sex organs, and the zygotes include a blastula stage in their embryonic development. Metazoans do not include the sponges, which have undifferentiated cells.[12]
+Unlike plant cells, animal cells have neither a cell wall nor chloroplasts. Vacuoles, when present, are more in number and much smaller than those in the plant cell. The body tissues are composed of numerous types of cell, including those found in muscles, nerves and skin. Each typically has a cell membrane formed of phospholipids, cytoplasm and a nucleus.  All of the different cells of an animal are derived from the embryonic germ layers. Those simpler invertebrates which are formed from two germ layers of ectoderm and endoderm are called diploblastic and the more developed animals whose structures and organs are formed from three germ layers are called triploblastic.[13] All of a triploblastic animal's tissues and organs are derived from the three germ layers of the embryo, the ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm.
+Animal tissues can be grouped into four basic types: connective, epithelial, muscle and nervous tissue.
+Connective tissues are fibrous and made up of cells scattered among inorganic material called the extracellular matrix. Connective tissue gives shape to organs and holds them in place. The main types are loose connective tissue, adipose tissue, fibrous connective tissue, cartilage and bone. The extracellular matrix contains proteins, the chief and most abundant of which is collagen. Collagen plays a major part in organizing and maintaining tissues. The matrix can be modified to form a skeleton to support or protect the body. An exoskeleton is a thickened, rigid cuticle which is stiffened by mineralization, as in crustaceans or by the cross-linking of its proteins as in insects. An endoskeleton is internal and present in all developed animals, as well as in many of those less developed.[13]
+Epithelial tissue is composed of closely packed cells, bound to each other by cell adhesion molecules, with little intercellular space. Epithelial cells can be squamous (flat), cuboidal or columnar and rest on a basal lamina, the upper layer of the basement membrane,[14] the lower layer is the reticular lamina lying next to the connective tissue in the extracellular matrix secreted by the epithelial cells.[15] There are many different types of epithelium, modified to suit a particular function. In the respiratory tract there is a type of ciliated epithelial lining; in the small intestine there are microvilli on the epithelial lining and in the large intestine there are intestinal villi. Skin consists of an outer layer of keratinized stratified squamous epithelium that covers the exterior of the vertebrate body. Keratinocytes make up to 95% of the cells in the skin.[16] The epithelial cells on the external surface of the body typically secrete an extracellular matrix in the form of a cuticle. In simple animals this may just be a coat of glycoproteins.[13] In more advanced animals, many glands are formed of epithelial cells.[17]
+Muscle cells (myocytes) form the active contractile tissue of the body. Muscle tissue functions to produce force and cause motion, either locomotion or movement within internal organs. Muscle is formed of contractile filaments and is separated into three main types; smooth muscle, skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle. Smooth muscle has no striations when examined microscopically. It contracts slowly but maintains contractibility over a wide range of stretch lengths. It is found in such organs as sea anemone tentacles and the body wall of sea cucumbers. Skeletal muscle contracts rapidly but has a limited range of extension. It is found in the movement of appendages and jaws. Obliquely striated muscle is intermediate between the other two. The filaments are staggered and this is the type of muscle found in earthworms that can extend slowly or make rapid contractions.[18] In higher animals striated muscles occur in bundles attached to bone to provide movement and are often arranged in antagonistic sets. Smooth muscle is found in the walls of the uterus, bladder, intestines, stomach, oesophagus, respiratory airways, and blood vessels. Cardiac muscle is found only in the heart, allowing it to contract and pump blood round the body.
+Nervous tissue is composed of many nerve cells known as neurons which transmit information. In some slow-moving radially symmetrical marine animals such as ctenophores and cnidarians (including sea anemones and jellyfish), the nerves form a nerve net, but in most animals they are organized longitudinally into bundles. In simple animals, receptor neurons in the body wall cause a local reaction to a stimulus. In more complex animals, specialized receptor cells such as chemoreceptors and photoreceptors are found in groups and send messages along neural networks to other parts of the organism. Neurons can be connected together in ganglia.[19] In higher animals, specialized receptors are the basis of sense organs and there is a central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and a peripheral nervous system. The latter consists of sensory nerves that transmit information from sense organs and motor nerves that influence target organs.[20][21] The peripheral nervous system is divided into the somatic nervous system which conveys sensation and controls voluntary muscle, and the autonomic nervous system which involuntarily controls smooth muscle, certain glands and internal organs, including the stomach.[22]
+All vertebrates have a similar basic body plan and at some point in their lives, mostly in the embryonic stage, share the major chordate characteristics; a stiffening rod, the notochord; a dorsal hollow tube of nervous material, the neural tube; pharyngeal arches; and a tail posterior to the anus. The spinal cord is protected by the vertebral column and is above the notochord and the gastrointestinal tract is below it.[23] Nervous tissue is derived from the ectoderm, connective tissues are derived from mesoderm, and gut is derived from the endoderm. At the posterior end is a tail which continues the spinal cord and vertebrae but not the gut. The mouth is found at the anterior end of the animal, and the anus at the base of the tail.[24] The defining characteristic of a vertebrate is the vertebral column, formed in the development of the segmented series of vertebrae. In most vertebrates the notochord becomes the nucleus pulposus of the intervertebral discs. However, a few vertebrates, such as the sturgeon and the coelacanth retain the notochord into adulthood.[25] Jawed vertebrates are typified by paired appendages, fins or legs, which may be secondarily lost. The limbs of vertebrates are considered to be homologous because the same underlying skeletal structure was inherited from their last common ancestor. This is one of the arguments put forward by Charles Darwin to support his theory of evolution.[26]
+The body of a fish is divided into a head, trunk and tail, although the divisions between the three are not always externally visible. The skeleton, which forms the support structure inside the fish, is either made of cartilage, in cartilaginous fish, or bone in bony fish. The main skeletal element is the vertebral column, composed of articulating vertebrae which are lightweight yet strong. The ribs attach to the spine and there are no limbs or limb girdles. The main external features of the fish, the fins, are composed of either bony or soft spines called rays, which with the exception of the caudal fins, have no direct connection with the spine. They are supported by the muscles which compose the main part of the trunk.[27] The heart has two chambers and pumps the blood through the respiratory surfaces of the gills and on round the body in a single circulatory loop.[28] The eyes are adapted for seeing underwater and have only local vision. There is an inner ear but no external or middle ear. Low frequency vibrations are detected by the lateral line system of sense organs that run along the length of the sides of fish, and these respond to nearby movements and to changes in water pressure.[27]
+Sharks and rays are basal fish with numerous primitive anatomical features similar to those of ancient fish, including skeletons composed of cartilage. Their bodies tend to be dorso-ventrally flattened, they usually have five pairs of gill slits and a large mouth set on the underside of the head. The dermis is covered with separate dermal placoid scales. They have a cloaca into which the urinary and genital passages open, but not a swim bladder. Cartilaginous fish produce a small number of large, yolky eggs. Some species are ovoviviparous and the young develop internally but others are oviparous and the larvae develop externally in egg cases.[29]
+The bony fish lineage shows more derived anatomical traits, often with major evolutionary changes from the features of ancient fish. They have a bony skeleton, are generally laterally flattened, have five pairs of gills protected by an operculum, and a mouth at or near the tip of the snout. The dermis is covered with overlapping scales. Bony fish have a swim bladder which helps them maintain a constant depth in the water column, but not a cloaca. They mostly spawn a large number of small eggs with little yolk which they broadcast into the water column.[29]
+Amphibians are a class of animals comprising frogs, salamanders and caecilians. They are tetrapods, but the caecilians and a few species of salamander have either no limbs or their limbs are much reduced in size. Their main bones are hollow and lightweight and are fully ossified and the vertebrae interlock with each other and have articular processes. Their ribs are usually short and may be fused to the vertebrae. Their skulls are mostly broad and short, and are often incompletely ossified. Their skin contains little keratin and lacks scales, but contains many mucous glands and in some species, poison glands. The hearts of amphibians have three chambers, two atria and one ventricle. They have a urinary bladder and nitrogenous waste products are excreted primarily as urea. Amphibians breathe by means of buccal pumping, a pump action in which air is first drawn into the buccopharyngeal region through the nostrils. These are then closed and the air is forced into the lungs by contraction of the throat.[30] They supplement this with gas exchange through the skin which needs to be kept moist.[31]
+In frogs the pelvic girdle is robust and the hind legs are much longer and stronger than the forelimbs. The feet have four or five digits and the toes are often webbed for swimming or have suction pads for climbing. Frogs have large eyes and no tail. Salamanders resemble lizards in appearance; their short legs project sideways, the belly is close to or in contact with the ground and they have a long tail. Caecilians superficially resemble earthworms and are limbless. They burrow by means of zones of muscle contractions which move along the body and they swim by undulating their body from side to side.[32]
+Reptiles are a class of animals comprising turtles, tuataras, lizards, snakes and crocodiles. They are tetrapods, but the snakes and a few species of lizard either have no limbs or their limbs are much reduced in size. Their bones are better ossified and their skeletons stronger than those of amphibians. The teeth are conical and mostly uniform in size. The surface cells of the epidermis are modified into horny scales which create a waterproof layer. Reptiles are unable to use their skin for respiration as do amphibians and have a more efficient respiratory system drawing air into their lungs by expanding their chest walls. The heart resembles that of the amphibian but there is a septum which more completely separates the oxygenated and deoxygenated bloodstreams. The reproductive system has evolved for internal fertilization, with a copulatory organ present in most species. The eggs are surrounded by amniotic membranes which prevents them from drying out and are laid on land, or develop internally in some species. The bladder is small as nitrogenous waste is excreted as uric acid.[33]
+Turtles are notable for their protective shells. They have an inflexible trunk encased in a horny carapace above and a plastron below. These are formed from bony plates embedded in the dermis which are overlain by horny ones and are partially fused with the ribs and spine. The neck is long and flexible and the head and the legs can be drawn back inside the shell. Turtles are vegetarians and the typical reptile teeth have been replaced by sharp, horny plates. In aquatic species, the front legs are modified into flippers.[34]
+Tuataras superficially resemble lizards but the lineages diverged in the Triassic period. There is one living species, Sphenodon punctatus. The skull has two openings (fenestrae) on either side and the jaw is rigidly attached to the skull. There is one row of teeth in the lower jaw and this fits between the two rows in the upper jaw when the animal chews. The teeth are merely projections of bony material from the jaw and eventually wear down. The brain and heart are more primitive than those of other reptiles, and the lungs have a single chamber and lack bronchi. The tuatara has a well-developed parietal eye on its forehead.[34]
+Lizards have skulls with only one fenestra on each side, the lower bar of bone below the second fenestra having been lost. This results in the jaws being less rigidly attached which allows the mouth to open wider. Lizards are mostly quadrupeds, with the trunk held off the ground by short, sideways-facing legs, but a few species have no limbs and resemble snakes. Lizards have moveable eyelids, eardrums are present and some species have a central parietal eye.[34]
+Snakes are closely related to lizards, having branched off from a common ancestral lineage during the Cretaceous period, and they share many of the same features. The skeleton consists of a skull, a hyoid bone, spine and ribs though a few species retain a vestige of the pelvis and rear limbs in the form of pelvic spurs. The bar under the second fenestra has also been lost and the jaws have extreme flexibility allowing the snake to swallow its prey whole. Snakes lack moveable eyelids, the eyes being covered by transparent "spectacle" scales. They do not have eardrums but can detect ground vibrations through the bones of their skull. Their forked tongues are used as organs of taste and smell and some species have sensory pits on their heads enabling them to locate warm-blooded prey.[35]
+Crocodilians are large, low-slung aquatic reptiles with long snouts and large numbers of teeth. The head and trunk are dorso-ventrally flattened and the tail is laterally compressed. It undulates from side to side to force the animal through the water when swimming. The tough keratinized scales provide body armour and some are fused to the skull. The nostrils, eyes and ears are elevated above the top of the flat head enabling them to remain above the surface of the water when the animal is floating. Valves seal the nostrils and ears when it is submerged. Unlike other reptiles, crocodilians have hearts with four chambers allowing complete separation of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood.[36]
+Birds are tetrapods but though their hind limbs are used for walking or hopping, their front limbs are wings covered with feathers and adapted for flight. Birds are endothermic, have a high metabolic rate, a light skeletal system and powerful muscles. The long bones are thin, hollow and very light. Air sac extensions from the lungs occupy the centre of some bones. The sternum is wide and usually has a keel and the caudal vertebrae are fused. There are no teeth and the narrow jaws are adapted into a horn-covered beak. The eyes are relatively large, particularly in nocturnal species such as owls. They face forwards in predators and sideways in ducks.[37]
+The feathers are outgrowths of the epidermis and are found in localized bands from where they fan out over the skin. Large flight feathers are found on the wings and tail, contour feathers cover the bird's surface and fine down occurs on young birds and under the contour feathers of water birds. The only cutaneous gland is the single uropygial gland near the base of the tail. This produces an oily secretion that waterproofs the feathers when the bird preens. There are scales on the legs, feet and claws on the tips of the toes.[37]
+Mammals are a diverse class of animals, mostly terrestrial but some are aquatic and others have evolved flapping or gliding flight. They mostly have four limbs but some aquatic mammals have no limbs or limbs modified into fins and the forelimbs of bats are modified into wings. The legs of most mammals are situated below the trunk, which is held well clear of the ground. The bones of mammals are well ossified and their teeth, which are usually differentiated, are coated in a layer of prismatic enamel. The teeth are shed once (milk teeth) during the animal's lifetime or not at all, as is the case in cetaceans. Mammals have three bones in the middle ear and a cochlea in the inner ear. They are clothed in hair and their skin contains glands which secrete sweat. Some of these glands are specialized as mammary glands, producing milk to feed the young. Mammals breathe with lungs and have a muscular diaphragm separating the thorax from the abdomen which helps them draw air into the lungs. The mammalian heart has four chambers and oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are kept entirely separate. Nitrogenous waste is excreted primarily as urea.[38]
+Mammals are amniotes, and most are viviparous, giving birth to live young. The exception to this are the egg-laying monotremes, the platypus and the echidnas of Australia. Most other mammals have a placenta through which the developing foetus obtains nourishment, but in marsupials, the foetal stage is very short and the immature young is born and finds its way to its mother's pouch where it latches on to a nipple and completes its development.[38]
+Humans have the overall body plan of a mammal. Humans have a head, neck, trunk (which includes the thorax and abdomen), two arms and hands, and two legs and feet.
+Generally, students of certain biological sciences, paramedics, prosthetists and orthotists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nurses, podiatrists, and medical students learn gross anatomy and microscopic anatomy from anatomical models, skeletons, textbooks, diagrams, photographs, lectures and tutorials and in addition, medical students generally also learn gross anatomy through practical experience of dissection and inspection of cadavers. The study of microscopic anatomy (or histology) can be aided by practical experience examining histological preparations (or slides) under a microscope.
+[40]
+Human anatomy, physiology and biochemistry are complementary basic medical sciences, which are generally taught to medical students in their first year at medical school. Human anatomy can be taught regionally or systemically; that is, respectively, studying anatomy by bodily regions such as the head and chest, or studying by specific systems, such as the nervous or respiratory systems.[3] The major anatomy textbook, Gray's Anatomy, has been reorganized from a systems format to a regional format, in line with modern teaching methods.[41][42] A thorough working knowledge of anatomy is required by physicians, especially surgeons and doctors working in some diagnostic specialties, such as histopathology and radiology.
+[43]
+Academic anatomists are usually employed by universities, medical schools or teaching hospitals. They are often involved in teaching anatomy, and research into certain systems, organs, tissues or cells.[43]
+Invertebrates constitute a vast array of living organisms ranging from the simplest unicellular eukaryotes such as Paramecium to such complex multicellular animals as the octopus, lobster and dragonfly. They constitute about 95% of the animal species. By definition, none of these creatures has a backbone. The cells of single-cell protozoans have the same basic structure as those of multicellular animals but some parts are specialized into the equivalent of tissues and organs. Locomotion is often provided by cilia or flagella or may proceed via the advance of pseudopodia, food may be gathered by phagocytosis, energy needs may be supplied by photosynthesis and the cell may be supported by an endoskeleton or an exoskeleton. Some protozoans can form multicellular colonies.[44]
+Metazoans are multicellular organism, different groups of cells of which have separate functions. The most basic types of metazoan tissues are epithelium and connective tissue, both of which are present in nearly all invertebrates. The outer surface of the epidermis is normally formed of epithelial cells and secretes an extracellular matrix which provides support to the organism. An endoskeleton derived from the mesoderm is present in echinoderms, sponges and some cephalopods. Exoskeletons are derived from the epidermis and is composed of chitin in arthropods (insects, spiders, ticks, shrimps, crabs, lobsters). Calcium carbonate constitutes the shells of molluscs, brachiopods and some tube-building polychaete worms and silica forms the exoskeleton of the microscopic diatoms and radiolaria.[45] Other invertebrates may have no rigid structures but the epidermis may secrete a variety of surface coatings such as the pinacoderm of sponges, the gelatinous cuticle of cnidarians (polyps, sea anemones, jellyfish) and the collagenous cuticle of annelids. The outer epithelial layer may include cells of several types including sensory cells, gland cells and stinging cells. There may also be protrusions such as microvilli, cilia, bristles, spines and tubercles.[46]
+Marcello Malpighi, the father of microscopical anatomy, discovered that plants had tubules similar to those he saw in insects like the silk worm. He observed that when a ring-like portion of bark was removed on a trunk a swelling occurred in the tissues above the ring, and he unmistakably interpreted this as growth stimulated by food coming down from the leaves, and being captured above the ring.[47]
+Arthropods comprise the largest phylum in the animal kingdom with over a million known invertebrate species.[48]
+Insects possess segmented bodies supported by a hard-jointed outer covering, the exoskeleton, made mostly of chitin. The segments of the body are organized into three distinct parts, a head, a thorax and an abdomen.[49] The head typically bears a pair of sensory antennae, a pair of compound eyes, one to three simple eyes (ocelli) and three sets of modified appendages that form the mouthparts. The thorax has three pairs of segmented legs, one pair each for the three segments that compose the thorax and one or two pairs of wings. The abdomen is composed of eleven segments, some of which may be fused and houses the digestive, respiratory, excretory and reproductive systems.[50] There is considerable variation between species and many adaptations to the body parts, especially wings, legs, antennae and mouthparts.[51]
+Spiders a class of arachnids have four pairs of legs; a body of two segments—a cephalothorax and an abdomen. Spiders have no wings and no antennae. They have mouthparts called chelicerae which are often connected to venom glands as most spiders are venomous. They have a second pair of appendages called pedipalps attached to the cephalothorax. These have similar segmentation to the legs and function as taste and smell organs. At the end of each male pedipalp is a spoon-shaped cymbium that acts to support the copulatory organ.
+In 1600 BCE, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an Ancient Egyptian medical text, described the heart, its vessels, liver, spleen, kidneys, hypothalamus, uterus and bladder, and showed the blood vessels diverging from the heart. The Ebers Papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) features a "treatise on the heart", with vessels carrying all the body's fluids to or from every member of the body.[53]
+Ancient Greek anatomy and physiology underwent great changes and advances throughout the early medieval world.  Over time, this medical practice expanded by a continually developing understanding of the functions of organs and structures in the body. Phenomenal anatomical observations of the human body were made, which have contributed towards the understanding of the brain, eye, liver, reproductive organs and the nervous system.
+The Hellenistic Egyptian city of Alexandria was the stepping-stone for Greek anatomy and physiology. Alexandria not only housed the biggest library for medical records and books of the liberal arts in the world during the time of the Greeks, but was also home to many medical practitioners and philosophers. Great patronage of the arts and sciences from the Ptolemy rulers helped raise Alexandria up, further rivalling the cultural and scientific achievements of other Greek states.[54]
+Some of the most striking advances in early anatomy and physiology took place in Hellenistic Alexandria.[54] Two of the most famous anatomists and physiologists of the third century were Herophilus and Erasistratus. These two physicians helped pioneer human dissection for medical research. They also conducted vivisections on the cadavers of condemned criminals, which was considered taboo until the Renaissance—Herophilus was recognized as the first person to perform systematic dissections.[55] Herophilus became known for his anatomical works making impressing contributions to many branches of anatomy and many other aspects of medicine.[56] Some of the works included classifying the system of the pulse, the discovery that human arteries had thicker walls than veins, and that the atria were parts of the heart. Herophilus's knowledge of the human body has provided vital input towards understanding the brain, eye, liver, reproductive organs and nervous system, and characterizing the course of disease.[57] Erasistratus accurately described the structure of the brain, including the cavities and membranes, and made a distinction between its cerebrum and cerebellum[58] During his study in Alexandria, Erasistratus was particularly concerned with studies of the circulatory and nervous systems. He was able to distinguish the sensory and the motor nerves in the human body and believed that air entered the lungs and heart, which was then carried throughout the body. His distinction between the arteries and veins—the arteries carrying the air through the body, while the veins carried the blood from the heart was a great anatomical discovery. Erasistratus was also responsible for naming and describing the function of the epiglottis and the valves of the heart, including the tricuspid.[59] During the third century, Greek physicians were able to differentiate nerves from blood vessels and tendons[60] and to realize that the nerves convey neural impulses.[54] It was Herophilus who made the point that damage to motor nerves induced paralysis.[61] Herophilus named the meninges and ventricles in the brain, appreciated the division between cerebellum and cerebrum and recognized that the brain was the "seat of intellect" and not a "cooling chamber" as propounded by Aristotle[62] Herophilus is also credited with describing the optic, oculomotor, motor division of the trigeminal, facial, vestibulocochlear and hypoglossal nerves.[63]
+Great feats were made during the third century in both the digestive and reproductive systems. Herophilus was able to discover and describe not only the salivary glands, but the small intestine and liver.[63] He showed that the uterus is a hollow organ and described the ovaries and uterine tubes. He recognized that spermatozoa were produced by the testes and was the first to identify the prostate gland.[63]
+The anatomy of the muscles and skeleton is described in the Hippocratic Corpus, an Ancient Greek medical work written by unknown authors.[64] Aristotle described vertebrate anatomy based on animal dissection. Praxagoras identified the difference between arteries and veins. Also in the 4th century BCE, Herophilos and Erasistratus produced more accurate anatomical descriptions based on vivisection of criminals in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic dynasty.[65][66]
+In the 2nd century, Galen of Pergamum, an anatomist, clinician, writer and philosopher,[67] wrote the final and highly influential anatomy treatise of ancient times.[68] He compiled existing knowledge and studied anatomy through dissection of animals.[67] He was one of the first experimental physiologists through his vivisection experiments on animals.[69] Galen's drawings, based mostly on dog anatomy, became effectively the only anatomical textbook for the next thousand years.[70] His work was known to Renaissance doctors only through Islamic Golden Age medicine until it was translated from the Greek some time in the 15th century.[70]
+Anatomy developed little from classical times until the sixteenth century; as the historian Marie Boas writes, "Progress in anatomy before the sixteenth century is as mysteriously slow as its development after 1500 is startlingly rapid".[70]:120–121 Between 1275 and 1326, the anatomists Mondino de Luzzi, Alessandro Achillini and Antonio Benivieni at Bologna carried out the first systematic human dissections since ancient times.[71][72][73] Mondino's Anatomy of 1316 was the first textbook in the medieval rediscovery of human anatomy. It describes the body in the order followed in Mondino's dissections, starting with the abdomen, then the thorax, then the head and limbs. It was the standard anatomy textbook for the next century.[70]
+Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was trained in anatomy by Andrea del Verrocchio.[70] He made use of his anatomical knowledge in his artwork, making many sketches of skeletal structures, muscles and organs of humans and other vertebrates that he dissected.[70][74]
+Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) (Latinized from Andries van Wezel), professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, is considered the founder of modern human anatomy.[75] Originally from Brabant, Vesalius published the influential book De humani corporis fabrica ("the structure of the human body"), a large format book in seven volumes, in 1543.[76] The accurate and intricately detailed illustrations, often in allegorical poses against Italianate landscapes, are thought to have been made by the artist Jan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian.[77]
+In England, anatomy was the subject of the first public lectures given in any science; these were given by the Company of Barbers and Surgeons in the 16th century, joined in 1583 by the Lumleian lectures in surgery at the Royal College of Physicians.[78]
+In the United States, medical schools began to be set up towards the end of the 18th century. Classes in anatomy needed a continual stream of cadavers for dissection and these were difficult to obtain. Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York were all renowned for body snatching activity as criminals raided graveyards at night, removing newly buried corpses from their coffins.[79] A similar problem existed in Britain where demand for bodies became so great that grave-raiding and even anatomy murder were practised to obtain cadavers.[80] Some graveyards were in consequence protected with watchtowers. The practice was halted in Britain by the Anatomy Act of 1832,[81][82] while in the United States, similar legislation was enacted after the physician William S. Forbes of Jefferson Medical College was found guilty in 1882 of "complicity with resurrectionists in the despoliation of graves in Lebanon Cemetery".[83]
+The teaching of anatomy in Britain was transformed by Sir John Struthers, Regius Professor of Anatomy at the University of Aberdeen from 1863 to 1889. He was responsible for setting up the system of three years of "pre-clinical" academic teaching in the sciences underlying medicine, including especially anatomy. This system lasted until the reform of medical training in 1993 and 2003. As well as teaching, he collected many vertebrate skeletons for his museum of comparative anatomy, published over 70 research papers, and became famous for his public dissection of the Tay Whale.[84][85] From 1822 the Royal College of Surgeons regulated the teaching of anatomy in medical schools.[86] Medical museums provided examples in comparative anatomy, and were often used in teaching.[87] Ignaz Semmelweis investigated puerperal fever and he discovered how it was caused. He noticed that the frequently fatal fever occurred more often in mothers examined by medical students than by midwives. The students went from the dissecting room to the hospital ward and examined women in childbirth. Semmelweis showed that when the trainees washed their hands in chlorinated lime before each clinical examination, the incidence of puerperal fever among the mothers could be reduced dramatically.[88]
+Before the modern medical era, the main means for studying the internal structures of the body were dissection of the dead and inspection, palpation and auscultation of the living. It was the advent of microscopy that opened up an understanding of the building blocks that constituted living tissues. Technical advances in the development of achromatic lenses increased the resolving power of the microscope and around 1839, Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann identified that cells were the fundamental unit of organization of all living things. Study of small structures involved passing light through them and the microtome was invented to provide sufficiently thin slices of tissue to examine. Staining techniques using artificial dyes were established to help distinguish between different types of tissue. Advances in the fields of histology and cytology began in the late 19th century[89] along with advances in surgical techniques allowing for the painless and safe removal of biopsy specimens. The invention of the electron microscope brought a great advance in resolution power and allowed research into the ultrastructure of cells and the organelles and other structures within them. About the same time, in the 1950s, the use of X-ray diffraction for studying the crystal structures of proteins, nucleic acids and other biological molecules gave rise to a new field of molecular anatomy.[89]
+Equally important advances have occurred in  non-invasive techniques for examining the interior structures of the body. X-rays can be passed through the body and used in medical radiography and fluoroscopy to differentiate interior structures that have varying degrees of opaqueness. Magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and ultrasound imaging have all enabled examination of internal structures in unprecedented detail to a degree far beyond the imagination of earlier generations.[90]

en/2180.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,115 @@

+Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès (/meɪˈljɛs/;[1] French: [meljɛs]; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938), was a French illusionist and film director who led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was well-known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards.[2] His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy.
+Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was born 8 December 1861 in Paris, son of Jean-Louis Méliès and his Dutch wife, Johannah-Catherine Schuering.[3] His father had moved to Paris in 1843 as a journeyman shoemaker and began working at a boot factory, where he met Méliès' mother. Johannah-Catherine's father had been the official bootmaker of the Dutch court before a fire ruined his business. She helped to educate Jean-Louis-Stanislas. Eventually the two married, founded a high-quality boot factory on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and had sons Henri and Gaston; by the time their third son Georges, had been born, the family had become wealthy.[3]
+Georges Méliès attended the Lycée Michelet from age seven until it was bombed during the Franco-Prussian War; he was then sent to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In his memoirs, Méliès emphasised his formal, classical education, in contrast to accusations early in his career that most filmmakers had been "illiterates incapable of producing anything artistic."[3] However, he acknowledged that his creative instincts usually outweighed intellectual ones: "The artistic passion was too strong for him, and while he would ponder a French composition or Latin verse, his pen mechanically sketched portraits or caricatures of his professors or classmates, if not some fantasy palace or an original landscape that already had the look of a theatre set."[3] Often disciplined by teachers for covering his notebooks and textbooks with drawings, young Georges began building cardboard puppet theatres at age ten and moved on to craft even more sophisticated marionettes as a teenager. Méliès graduated from the Lycée with a baccalauréat in 1880.[4]
+After completing his education, Méliès joined his brothers in the family shoe business, where he learned how to sew. After three years of mandatory military service[citation needed], his father sent him to London to work as a clerk for a family friend and to improve his English. While in London, he began to visit the Egyptian Hall, run by the London illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne, and he developed a lifelong passion for stage magic.[4] Méliès returned to Paris in 1885 with a new desire: to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts. His father, however, refused to support him financially as an artist, so Georges settled with supervising the machinery at the family factory. That same year, he avoided his family's desire for him to marry his brother's sister-in-law and instead married Eugénie Génin, a family friend's daughter whose guardians had left her a sizable dowry. Together they had two children: Georgette,[5] born in 1888, and André, born in 1901.
+While working at the family factory, Méliès continued to cultivate his interest in stage magic, attending performances at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, which had been founded by the magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. He also began taking magic lessons from Emile Voisin, who gave him the opportunity to perform his first public shows, at the Cabinet Fantastique of the Grévin Wax Museum and, later, at the Galerie Vivienne.[4]
+In 1888, Méliès' father retired, and Georges Méliès sold his share of the family shoe business to his two brothers. With the money from the sale and from his wife's dowry, he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Although the theatre was "superb" and equipped with lights, levers, trap doors, and several automata, many of the available illusions and tricks were out of date, and attendance to the theatre was low even after Méliès' initial renovations.
+Over the next nine years, Méliès personally created over 30 new illusions that brought more comedy and melodramatic pageantry to performances, much like those Méliès had seen in London, and attendance greatly improved. One of his best-known illusions was the Recalcitrant Decapitated Man, in which a professor's head is cut off in the middle of a speech and continues talking until it is returned to his body. When he purchased the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, Méliès also inherited its chief mechanic Eugène Calmels and such performers as Jehanne D'Alcy, who would become his mistress and, later, his second wife. While running the theatre, Méliès also worked as a political cartoonist for the liberal newspaper La Griffe, which was edited by his cousin Adolphe Méliès.[4]
+On 28 December 1895, Méliès attended a special private demonstration of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, given for owners of Parisian houses of spectacle.[6][a] Méliès immediately offered the Lumières 10,000₣ for one of their machines; the Lumières refused, anxious to keep a close control on their invention and to emphasize the scientific nature of the device. (For the same reasons, they refused the Musée Grévin's 20,000₣ bid and the Folies Bergère's 50,000₣ bid the same night.)[6] Méliès, intent on finding a film projector for the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, turned elsewhere; numerous other inventors in Europe and America were experimenting with machines similar to the Lumières' invention, albeit at a less technically sophisticated level. Possibly acting on a tip from Jehanne d'Alcy, who may have seen Robert W. Paul's Animatograph film projector while on tour in England, Méliès traveled to London. He bought an Animatograph from Paul, as well as several short films sold by Paul and by the Edison Manufacturing Company. By April 1896, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was showing films as part of its daily performances.[7]
+Méliès, after studying the design of the Animatograph, modified the machine so that it would serve as a film camera.[8] As raw film stock and film processing labs were not yet available in Paris, Méliès purchased unperforated film in London, and personally developed and printed his films through trial and error.[7]
+In September 1896, Méliès, Lucien Korsten, and Lucien Reulos patented the Kinétographe Robert-Houdin, a cast iron camera-projector, which Méliès referred to as his "coffee grinder" and "machine gun" because of the noise that it made. By 1897 technology had caught up and better cameras were put on sale in Paris, leading Méliès to discard his own camera and purchase several better cameras made by Gaumont, the Lumières, and Pathé.[7]
+Méliès directed over 500 films between 1896 and 1913, ranging in length from one to forty minutes. In subject matter, these films are often similar to the magic theatre shows that Méliès had been doing, containing "tricks" and impossible events, such as objects disappearing or changing size. These early special effects films were essentially devoid of plot. The special effects were used only to show what was possible, rather than enhance the overall narrative. Méliès' early films were mostly composed of single in-camera effects, used for the entirety of the film. For example, after experimenting with multiple exposure, Méliès created his film The One-Man Band in which he played seven different characters simultaneously.[9]
+Méliès began shooting his first films in May 1896, and screening them at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin by that August. At the end of 1896 he and Reulos founded the Star Film Company, with Korsten acting as his primary camera operator. Many of his earliest films were copies and remakes of the Lumière brothers' films, made to compete with the 2000 daily customers of the Grand Café.[7] This included his first film Playing Cards, which is similar to an early Lumière film. However, many of his other early films reflected Méliès' knack for theatricality and spectacle, such as A Terrible Night, in which a hotel guest is attacked by a giant bedbug.[10] But more importantly, the Lumière brothers had dispatched camera operators across the world to document it as ethnographic documentarians, intending their invention to be highly important in scientific and historical study. Méliès' Star Film Company, on the other hand, was geared more towards the "fairground clientele" who wanted his specific brand of magic and illusion: art.[7]
+In these earliest films, Méliès began to experiment with (and often invent) special effects that were unique to filmmaking. This began, according to Méliès' memoirs, by accident when his camera jammed in the middle of a take and "a Madeleine-Bastille bus changed into a hearse and women changed into men. The substitution trick, called the stop trick, had been discovered."[10] This same stop trick effect had already been used by Thomas Edison when depicting a decapitation in The Execution of Mary Stuart; however, Méliès' film effects and unique style of film magic are his own. He first used these effects in The Vanishing Lady, in which the by then cliché magic trick of a person vanishing from the stage by means of a trap door is enhanced by the person turning into a skeleton until finally reappearing on the stage.[10]
+In September 1896, Méliès began to build a film studio on his property in Montreuil, just outside Paris. The main stage building was made entirely of glass walls and ceilings so as to allow in sunlight for film exposure and its dimensions were identical to the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. The property also included a shed for dressing rooms and a hangar for set construction. Because colours would often photograph in unexpected ways on black-and-white film, all sets, costumes and actors' makeup were coloured in different tones of gray. Méliès described the studio as "the union of the photography workshop (in its gigantic proportions) and the theatre stage."[10] Actors performed in front of a painted set as inspired by the conventions of magic and musical theatre. For the remainder of his film career, he would divide his time between Montreuil and the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, where he "arrived at the studio at seven a.m. to put in a ten-hour day building sets and props. At five, he would change his clothes and set out for Paris in order to be at the theatre office by six to receive callers. After a quick dinner, he was back to the theatre for the eight o'clock show, during which he sketched his set designs, and then returned to Montreuil to sleep. On Fridays and Saturdays, he shot scenes prepared during the week, while Sundays and holidays were taken up with a theatre matinee, three film screenings, and an evening presentation that lasted until eleven-thirty."[10]
+In total, Méliès made 78 films in 1896 and 52 in 1897. By this time he had covered every genre of film that he would continue to film for the rest of his career. These included the Lumière-like documentaries, comedies, historical reconstructions, dramas, magic tricks, and féeries (fairy stories), which would become his most well-known genre. That same year, Georges Brunel wrote that "MM. Méliès and Reulos have, above all, made a speciality of fantastic or artistic scenes, reproductions of theatre scenes, etc., so as to create a special genre, entirely distinct from the ordinary cinematographic views consisting of street scenes or genre subjects."[11] Like the Lumière brothers and Pathé, Star Films also made "stag films" such as Peeping Tom at the Seaside, A Hypnotist at Work and After the Ball, which is the only one of these films that has survived, and stars Jeanne d'Alcy stripping down to a flesh-coloured leotard and being bathed by her maid. Between 1896 and 1900, Méliès also made ten advertisements for such products as whiskey, chocolate, and baby cereal.[11] In September 1897, Méliès attempted to turn the Théâtre Robert-Houdin into a movie theatre with fewer magic shows and film screenings every night. But by late December 1897, film screenings were limited to Sunday nights only.[12]
+Méliès made only 27 films in 1898, but his work was becoming more ambitious and elaborate. His films included a historical reconstruction of the sinking of the USS Maine titled Divers at Work on the Wreck of the "Maine", the magic trick film The Famous Box Trick, and the féerie The Astronomer's Dream. In this film, Méliès plays an astronomer who has the Moon cause his laboratory to transform and demons and angels to visit him. He also made one of his first of many religious satires with The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which a statue of Jesus Christ on the cross is transformed into a seductive woman, played by Jeanne d'Alcy.[12]
+He continued to experiment with his in-camera special effects, such as a reverse shot in A Dinner Under Difficulties, where he hand cranked a strip of film backwards through his camera to achieve the effect. He also experimented with superimposition, where he would film actors in a black background, then rewind the film through the camera and expose the footage again to create a double exposure. These films included The Cave of the Demons, in which transparent ghosts haunt a cave, and The Four Troublesome Heads, in which Méliès removes his own head three times and creates a musical chorus. Achieving these effects was extremely difficult, requiring considerable skill. In a 1907 article, Méliès noted: "Every second the actor playing different scenes ten times has to remember, while the film is rolling, exactly what he did at the same point in the preceding scenes and the exact place where he was on the stage."[12]
+Méliès made 48 films in 1899 as he continued to experiment with special effects, for example in the early horror film Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb. The film is not a historical reconstruction of the Egyptian Queen, and instead depicts her mummy being resurrected in modern times. Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb was believed to be a lost film until a copy was discovered in 2005 in Paris.[13] That year, Méliès also made two of his most ambitious and well-known films. In the summer he made the historical reconstruction The Dreyfus Affair, a film based on the then-ongoing and controversial political scandal, in which the Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused and framed for treason by his commanders. Méliès was pro-Dreyfus and the film depicts Dreyfus sympathetically as falsely accused and unjustly incarcerated on Devil's Island prison. At screenings of the film, fights broke out between people on different sides of the debate and the police eventually banned the final part of the film where Dreyfus returns to prison.[14]
+Later that year, Méliès made the féerie Cinderella, based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale. The film was six minutes long and had a cast of over 35 people, including Bleuette Bernon in the title role. It was also Méliès' first film with multiple scenes, known as tableaux. The film was very successful across Europe and in the United States, playing mostly in fairgrounds and music halls. American film distributors such as Siegmund Lubin were especially in need of new material both to attract their audience with new films and to counter Edison's growing monopoly. Méliès' films were particularly popular, and Cinderella was often screened as a featured attraction even years after its U.S. release in December 1899.[15] Such U.S. filmmakers as Thomas Edison were resentful of the competition from foreign companies and after the success of Cinderella, attempted to block Méliès from screening most films in the U.S.; but they soon discovered the process of creating film dupes (duplicate negatives). Méliès and others then established in 1900 the trade union Chambre Syndicale des Editeurs Cinématographiques[16][17] as a way to defend themselves in foreign markets. Méliès was made the first president of the union, serving until 1912, and the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was the group's headquarters.
+Around the same time, Méliès used the financial success of his films to expand the Montreuil studio, which allowed him to create even more elaborate sets and additional storage space for his growing archive of props, costumes and other memorabilia.
+In 1900, Méliès made numerous films, including the 13-minute-long Joan of Arc. He also made The One-Man Band, in which Méliès continued to fine-tune his special effects by multiplying himself on camera to play seven instruments simultaneously. Another notable film was The Christmas Dream, which merged cinematic effects with traditional Christmas pantomime scenes.[18]
+In 1901, Méliès continued producing successful films and was at the peak of his popularity. His films that year included The Brahmin and the Butterfly, in which Méliès portrays a Brahmin who transforms a caterpillar into a beautiful woman with wings, but is himself turned into a caterpillar. He also made the féerie Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard, both based on stories from Charles Perrault. In Bluebeard, Méliès plays the eponymous wife-murderer and co-stars with Jeanne d'Alcy and Bleuette Bernon. The film is an early example of parallel cross-cutting and match cuts of characters moving from one room to the next. The Edison Company's 1902 film Jack and the Beanstalk, directed by Edwin S. Porter, was considered a less successful American version of several Méliès films, particularly Bluebeard.[19] That year, he also made Off to Bloomingdale Asylum, a blackface burlesque that includes four white bus passengers transforming into one large black passenger who is then shot by the bus driver.[18]
+In 1902, Méliès began to experiment with camera movement to create the illusion of a character changing size. He achieved this effect by "advancing the camera forward" on a pulley-drawn chair system, which was perfected to allow the camera operator to accurately adjust focus and for the actor to adjust his or her position in the frame as needed.[18] This effect began with The Devil and the Statue, in which Méliès plays Satan and grows to the size of a giant to terrorize William Shakespeare's Juliet, but then shrinks when the Virgin Mary comes to the rescue. This effect was used again in The Man with the Rubber Head, in which Méliès plays a scientist who expands his own head to enormous proportions. This new experiment, along with the others that he had perfected over the years, would be used in his most well-known and beloved film later that year.[18]
+In May 1902, Méliès made the film A Trip to the Moon which was loosely based on Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon. In the film, Méliès stars as Professor Barbenfouillis, a character similar to the astronomer he played in The Astronomer's Dream in 1898.[20] Professor Barbenfouillis is the President of the Astronomer's Club and proposes an expedition to the Moon. A space vehicle in the form of a large artillery shell is built in his laboratory, and he uses it to launch six men (including himself) on a voyage to the Moon. The vehicle is shot out of a large cannon into space and hits the Man in the Moon in the eye. The group explores the Moon's surface before going to sleep. As they dream, they are observed by the Moon goddess Phoebe, played by Bleuette Bernon, who causes it to snow. Later, while underground, they are attacked and captured by a group of Moon aliens, played by acrobats from the Folies Bergère. Taken before the alien king, they manage to escape and are chased back to their spaceship. Then, with the aid of a rope attached to the spaceship, the men, along with an alien, fall from the Moon back to Earth, landing in the ocean (where a superimposed fish tank creates the illusion of the deep ocean). Eventually the spaceship is towed ashore and the returning adventurers are celebrated by the townspeople.[21] At 14 minutes, it was Méliès' longest film up to that date and cost 10,000 francs to produce.
+The film was an enormous success in France and around the world, and Méliès sold both black-and-white and hand-coloured versions to exhibitors. The film made Méliès famous in the United States, where such producers as Thomas Edison, Siegmund Lubin and William Selig had produced illegal copies and made large amounts of money from them.[22] This copyright violation caused Méliès to open a Star Films office in New York City, with his brother Gaston Méliès in charge. Gaston had been unsuccessful in the shoe business and agreed to join his more successful brother in the film industry. He travelled to New York in November 1902 and discovered the extent of the infringement in the U.S., such as Biograph having paid royalties on Méliès' film to film promoter Charles Urban.[23] When Gaston opened the branch office in New York, it included a charter that partly read "In opening a factory and office in New York we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice, we will act!"[21] Gaston was assisted in the U.S. by Lucien Reulos, who was the husband of Gaston's sister-in-law, Louise de Mirmont.[24]
+Méliès' great success in 1902 continued with his three other major productions of that year. In The Coronation of Edward VII, Méliès reenacts the crowning of the new British King Edward VII. The film was shot prior to the actual event (since he was denied access to the coronation) and was commissioned by Charles Urban, head of the Warwick Trading Company and the Star Films representative in London. The film was ready to be released on the day of the coronation; however, the event was postponed for six weeks due to Edward's health. This allowed Méliès to add actual footage of the carriage procession in the film. The film was financially successful and King Edward VII was said to have enjoyed it. Next, Méliès made the féeries Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants, based on the novel by Jonathan Swift, and Robinson Crusoe, based on the novel by Daniel Defoe.[21]
+In 1903 Méliès made The Kingdom of the Fairies, which film critic Jean Mitry has called "undoubtedly Méliès's best film, and in any case the most intensely poetic".[25] The Los Angeles Times called the film "an interesting exhibit of the limits to which moving picture making can be carried in the hands of experts equipped with time and money to carry out their devices".[26] Prints of the film survive in the film archives of the British Film Institute and the U.S. Library of Congress.[27]
+Méliès continued the year by perfecting many of his camera effects, such as more fast-paced transformations in Ten Ladies in One Umbrella and the seven superimpositions that he used in The Melomaniac. He finished the year with a film based on the Faust legend, The Damnation of Faust. The film is loosely based on an opera by Hector Berlioz, but it pays less attention to the story and more to the special effects that represent a tour of hell. These include underground gardens, walls of fire and walls of water.[25] In 1904, he made a sequel, Faust and Marguerite. This time, the film was based on an opera by Charles Gounod. Méliès also created a combined version of the two films that would sync up with the main arias of the operas. He continued making "high art" films later in 1904 such as The Barber of Seville. These films were popular with both audiences and critics at the time of their release, and helped Méliès establish more prestige.[25]
+His major production of 1904 was The Impossible Voyage, a film similar to A Trip to the Moon about an expedition around the world, into the oceans and even to the sun. In the film, Méliès plays Engineer Mabouloff of the Institute of Incoherent Geography, who is similar to the previous Professor Barbenfouillis. Mabouloff leads a group on the trip on the many Automobouloffs, the vehicles that they use of their travels. As the men are traveling up to the highest peaks of the Alps, their vehicle continues moving upwards and takes them unexpectedly to the sun, which has a face much like the man in the moon and swallows the vehicle. Eventually the men use a submarine to launch back to earth and into the ocean, and are greeted back home by adoring admirers. The film was 24 minutes long and was a success. Film critic Lewis Jacobs has said that "the film expressed all of Méliès talents ... The complexity of his tricks, his resourcefulness with mechanical contrivances, the imaginativeness of the settings and the sumptuous tableaux made the film a masterpiece for its day."[25]
+Later in 1904, Folies Bergère director Victor de Cottens invited Méliès to create a special effects film to be included in his theatre's revue. The result was An Adventurous Automobile Trip, a satire of Leopold II of Belgium. The film was screened at the Folies Bergère before Méliès began to sell it as a Star Films production.[25] In late 1904, Thomas Edison sued the American production company Paley & Steiner over copyright infringement for films that had stories, characters and even shot set-ups exactly like films that Edison had made. Edison also included Pathé Frères, Eberhard Schneider and Star Films in this lawsuit for unspecified reasons. Paley & Steiner settled with Edison out of court (and were later bought out by Edison) and the case never went to trial.[28]
+In 1905, Victor de Cottens asked Méliès to collaborate with him on The Merry Deeds of Satan, a theatrical revue for the Théâtre du Châtelet. Méliès contributed two short films for the performances, Le Voyage dans l'espace (The Space Trip) and Le Cyclone (The Cyclone), and co-wrote the scenario with de Cottons for the entire revue. 1905 was also the 100th birthday of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, and the Théâtre Robert-Houdin created a special celebration performance, including Méliès' first new stage trick in several years, Les Phénomènes du Spiritisme. At the same time, he was again remodeling and expanding his studio at Montreuil by installing electric lights, adding a second stage and buying costumes from other sources.[25] Méliès's films for 1905 include the adventure The Palace of the Arabian Nights and the féerie Rip's Dream, based on the Rip Van Winkle legend and the opera by Robert Planquette. In 1906, his output included an updated, comedic adaptation of the Faust legend The Merry Frolics of Satan and The Witch. But the féerie style that Méliès was best known for was beginning to lose popularity and he began to make films in other genres, such as crime and family films. In the U.S., Gaston Méliès had to reduce the sale prices of three of Méliès' earlier popular féeries, Cinderella, Bluebeard and Robinson Crusoe. By the end of 1905 Gaston had cut the prices of all films on the Star Films catalog by 20%, which did improve sales.[29]
+In 1907, Méliès created three new illusions for the stage and performed them at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, while he continued producing a steady stream of films, including Under the Seas, and a short version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Yet such film critics as Jean Mitry, Georges Sadoul, and others have declared that Méliès' work began to decline and, in the film scholar Miriam Rosen's words, to "lapse into the repetition of old formulas on the one hand and an uneasy imitation of new trends on the other."[29]
+In 1908, Thomas Edison created the Motion Picture Patents Company as a way to control the film industry in the United States and Europe. The companies that joined the conglomerate were Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, American Pathé and Méliès' Star Film Company, with Edison acting as president of the collective. Star Films was obligated to supply the MPPC with one thousand feet of film per week, and Méliès made fifty eight films that year in fulfillment of the obligation. Gaston Méliès established his own studio in Chicago, the Méliès Manufacturing Company, which helped his brother fulfill the obligation to Edison, although Gaston produced no films in 1908.[29] That year, Méliès made one of his most ambitious films: Humanity Through the Ages. This pessimistic film retells the history of humans from Cain and Abel to the Hague Peace Conference of 1907. The film was unsuccessful, yet Méliès was proud of it throughout his life.[30]
+Early in 1909, Méliès presided over the "Congrès International des éditeurs de films" in Paris.
+Under Méliès’ chairmanship, the european congress took place from 2 to 4 February 1909. In his mémoires[31] Méliès says that this congress was the second one,  following the 1908 congress.[32] But in 1909, the congress made important decisions regarding the films’leasing and adoption of a single type of film perforation, as to thwart Edison and the MPPC.[33] Like others, Méliès was unhappy with the monopoly that Edison had created and wanted to fight back. The members of that congress agreed no longer to sell films, but rather to lease them for four-month periods, only to members of their own organization, and to adopt a standardized film perforation count on all films.  Méliès was unhappy about the second of the three conditions, because his principal clients were owners of fairgrounds and music halls.  A fairground trade journal quoted Méliès as saying, "I am not a corporation;  I am an independent producer."[34]
+Méliès resumed filmmaking in the autumn of 1909 and produced nine films,[35] including Whimsical Illusions, in which he presents a magical effect on stage. At the same time, Gaston Méliès had moved the Méliès Manufacturing Company to Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1910, Gaston established   the Star Film Ranch, a studio in San Antonio, Texas, where he began to produce Westerns. By 1911, Gaston had renamed his branch of Star Films American Wildwest Productions, and opened a studio in southern California. He produced over one hundred thirty films between 1910 and 1912, and he was the primary source for fulfilling Star Films' obligation to Thomas Edison's company. Between 1910 and 1912, Georges Méliès produced very few films.[34]
+In 1910, Méliès temporarily stopped making films as
+he prefers to create a big magic show Les Fantômes du Nil, and go on a  very expansive tour in Europe and North Africa.[36][37] Later that year, Star Films signed an agreement with the Gaumont Film Company to distribute all of its films. But in the autumn of 1910, Méliès made a deal with Charles Pathé that would eventually destroy his own film career.  Méliès accepted a large amount of money to produce films and in exchange Pathé Frères would distribute and reserve the right to edit these films.  Pathé also held the deed to both Méliès' home and his Montreuil studio as part of the deal.  Méliès immediately began production on more elaborate films and the two that he produced in 1911 were Baron Munchausen's Dream and The Diabolical Church Window. Despite the extravagance of these féeries that had been extremely popular just a decade before, both films failed financially.[34]
+In 1912, Méliès continued making ambitious films, most notably with the féerie The Conquest of the Pole. Although inspired by such contemporary events as Robert Peary's expedition to the North Pole in 1909 and Roald Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole in 1911, the film also included such fantastic elements as a griffith-headed aerobus and a snow giant that was operated by twelve stage hands, as well as elements reminiscent of Jules Verne and some of the same "fantastic voyage" themes as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage. Unfortunately, Conquest of the Pole was not profitable, and Pathé decided to exercise its right to edit Méliès's films from then on.
+One of Méliès' last féeries was Cinderella or the Glass Slipper, a fifty-four-minute retelling of the Cinderella legend, shot with new deep focus lenses, outdoors instead of against theatrical backdrops. Pathé hired Méliès's longtime rival Ferdinand Zecca to trim the film to thirty three minutes, and it too was unprofitable. After similar experiences with The Knight of the Snows and The Voyage of the Bourrichon Family in late 1912, Méliès broke his contract with Pathé.[34]
+Meanwhile, Gaston Méliès had taken his family and a film crew of over twenty people to Tahiti in the summer of 1912. For the rest of that year and well into 1913, he traveled throughout the South Pacific and Asia, and sent film footage back to his son in New York. The footage was often damaged or otherwise unusable, and Gaston was no longer able to fulfill Star Films' obligation to Thomas Edison's company. By the end of his travels, Gaston Méliès had lost $50,000 and had to sell the American branch of Star Films to Vitagraph Studios. Gaston eventually returned to Europe and died in 1915. He and Georges Méliès never spoke to one another again.[34]
+When Méliès broke his contract with Pathé in 1913, he had nothing with which to cover his indebtedness to that company. Although a moratorium declared at the onset of war in 1914 prevented Pathé from taking possession of his home and Montreuil studio, Méliès was bankrupt, and unable to continue making films. In his memoirs, he attributes what Miriam Rosen describes as "his own inability to adapt to the rental system" with Pathé and other companies, his brother Gaston's poor financial decisions, and the horrors of World War I as the main reasons that he stopped making movies. The final crisis, in 1913, was the death of Méliès' first wife, Eugénie Génin, in May, leaving him alone to raise their twelve-year-old son, André.  The war shut the Théâtre Robert-Houdin for a year, and Méliès left Paris with his two children for several years.[38]
+In 1917, the French army turned the main studio building at his Montreuil property into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Méliès and his family then turned the second studio set into a theatrical stage and performed over twenty four revues there until 1923. During the war, the French army confiscated over four hundred  of Star Films' original prints, melted them down to recover silver and celluloid, the latter of which the army made heels for shoes.[39]
+In 1923, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was torn down to rebuild the Boulevard Haussmann. That same year Pathé was finally able to take over Star Films and the Montreuil studio. In a rage, Méliès burned all of the negatives of his films that he had stored at the Montreuil studio, as well as most of the sets and costumes. As a result, many of his films do not exist today. Nonetheless, just over two hundred Méliès films have been preserved, and have been available on DVD since December 2011.
+Méliès was largely forgotten and financially ruined by December 1925, when he married his long-time mistress, the actress Jehanne d'Alcy. The couple scraped together a living by working at a small candy and toy stand d'Alcy owned in the main hall of the Gare Montparnasse.[40]
+Around the same time, the gradual rediscovery of Méliès's career began. In 1924, the journalist Georges-Michel Coissac managed to track him down and interview him for a book on cinema history. Coissac, who hoped to underline the importance of French pioneers to early film, was the first film historian to demonstrate Méliès's importance to the industry. In 1926, spurred on by Coissac's book, the magazine Ciné-Journal located Méliès, now working at the Gare Montparnasse, and commissioned a memoir from him.[40] By the late 1920s, several journalists had begun to research Méliès and his life's work, creating new interest in him. As his prestige began to grow in the film world, he was given more recognition and in December 1929, a gala retrospective of his work was held at the Salle Pleyel. In his memoirs, Méliès said that at the event he "experienced one of the most brilliant moments of his life."[38]
+Eventually Georges Méliès was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the medal of which was presented to him in October 1931 by Louis Lumière.[41] Lumière himself said that Méliès was the "creator of the cinematic spectacle."[38] However, the enormous amount of praise that he was receiving did not help his livelihood or decrease his poverty. In a letter written to French filmmaker Eugène Lauste, Méliès wrote that "luckily enough, I am strong and in good health. But it is hard to work 14 hours a day without getting my Sundays or holidays, in an icebox in winter and a furnace in summer."[38]
+In 1932, the Cinema Society arranged a place for Méliès, his granddaughter Madeleine and Jeanne d'Alcy at La Maison du Retraite du Cinéma, the film industry's retirement home in Orly. Méliès was greatly relieved to be admitted to the home and wrote to an American journalist: "My best satisfaction in all is to be sure not to be one day without bread and home!"[38] In Orly, Méliès worked with several younger directors on scripts for films that never came to be made. These included a new version of Baron Munchausen with Hans Richter and a film that was to be titled Le Fantôme du métro (Phantom of the Metro) with Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert.[42] He also acted in a few advertisements with Prévert in his later years.
+Langlois and Franju had met Méliès in 1935 with René Clair,[43] and in 1936, rented an abandoned building on the property of the Orly retirement home to store their collection of film prints. They then entrusted the key to the building to Méliès and he became the first conservator of what would eventually become the Cinémathèque Française. Although he was never able to make another film after 1912 or stage another theatrical performance after 1923, he continued to draw, write to and advise younger film and theatrical admirers until the end of his life.[38]
+By late 1937, Méliès had become very ill and Langlois arranged for him to be admitted to the Léopold Bellan Hospital in Paris. Langlois had become close to him, and he and Franju visited him shortly before his death. When they arrived, Méliès showed them one of his last drawings of a champagne bottle with the cork popped and bubbling over. He then told them: "Laugh, my friends. Laugh with me, laugh for me, because I dream your dreams."[44] Georges Méliès died of cancer on 21 January 1938 at the age of 76—just hours after the passing of Émile Cohl, another great French film pioneer—and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.[45]
+Walt Disney, on being presented with the Legion of Honour in 1936, expressed gratitude to Méliès and his fellow pioneer Émile Cohl, saying they "discovered the means of placing poetry within the reach of the man in the street."[46]
+The Smashing Pumpkins released a music video for their 1995 single, "Tonight, Tonight", highly inspired by Georges Méliès's film A Trip to the Moon. The music video was directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
+Terry Gilliam has called Méliès "the first great film magician," adding: "His joyous sense of fun and ability to astound were a big influence on both my early animations and then my live-action films… Of course, Méliès still has a tight creative grip on me."[47]
+The 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, and the 2011 film Hugo by Martin Scorsese, centre on the later life of Méliès, who is played by Sir Ben Kingsley in the film Hugo. Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, Méliès’ granddaughter, is played by the young Chloë Grace Moretz.[48] The film includes reconstructions of some of the fantastical stage sets which appeared in Melies's early films.[48]
+Méliès was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2015.[49][50]
+Méliès was inducted into the Visual Effects Society  Hall of Fame in 2017.[51]
+On 3 May 2018, Google honoured Méliès with its first ever virtual reality doodle, which contains themes of his many films.[52]
+Due to a variety of factors, roughly 200 out of over 500 Méliès' films remain in existence today. These factors include Méliès' destruction of his original negatives, the French army's confiscation of his prints and the typical deterioration of the majority (an estimated 80 percent) of films made before 1950. Several of Méliès' new films have occasionally been discovered but the majority that were preserved come from the U.S. Library of Congress, due to Gaston Méliès submitting paper prints of each frame of all new Star Films in order to preserve copyright when he set up the American branch of Star Films in 1902.[25]

en/2181.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,329 @@

+George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, he had previously served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. Born into the Bush family, his father, George H. W. Bush, served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993.
+Bush is the eldest son of Barbara and George H. W. Bush, and the second son to become the American president after his father, the first being John Quincy Adams. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, he worked in the oil industry. Bush married Laura Welch in 1977 and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. Bush was elected president of the United States in 2000 when he defeated Democratic incumbent Vice President Al Gore after a narrow and contested win that involved a Supreme Court decision to stop a recount in Florida. He became the fourth person to be elected president without a popular vote victory.
+In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush created the United States Department of Homeland Security and launched a "War on Terror" that began with the war in Afghanistan in 2001. He also launched the Iraq War in 2003, with the administration arguing that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, and that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States. Some administration officials falsely claimed that Hussein had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. No stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq. Signature legislation passed during his presidency included broad tax cuts, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Medicare Modernization Act, and funding for the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. In the 2004 presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in a close election. After his re-election, Bush received criticism from across the political spectrum[4][5] for his handling of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina,[6][7] and other challenges. Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post-World War II recession, often referred to as the "Great Recession", prompting the Bush administration to obtain congressional approval for multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system.
+Bush was among the most popular, as well as unpopular, U.S. presidents in history; he received the highest recorded approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but one of the lowest such ratings during the 2008 financial crisis.[8] Bush finished his second term in office in 2009 and returned to Texas. In 2010, he published his memoir, Decision Points.[9] His presidential library opened in 2013. His presidency has been rated as below-average in historical rankings of U.S. presidents, although his public favorability ratings have improved since leaving office.
+George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, at Yale–New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, while his father was a student at Yale.[10] He was the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce. He was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, with four siblings, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. Another younger sister, Robin, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953.[11] His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut.[12] His father was Ronald Reagan's vice president from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st U.S. president from 1989 to 1993. Bush has English and some German ancestry, along with more distant Dutch, Welsh, Irish, French, and Scottish roots.[13]
+Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the family moved to Houston after he had completed seventh grade. He then spent two years at The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Piney Point Village, Texas in the Houston area.[14]
+Bush attended high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he played baseball and was the head cheerleader during his senior year.[15][16] He attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.[17] During this time, he was a cheerleader and a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon, serving as the president of the fraternity during his senior year.[18][19][20] Bush became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior.[21] Bush was a rugby union player and was on Yale's 1st XV.[22] He characterized himself as an average student.[23] His GPA during his first three years at Yale was 77, and he had a similar average under a nonnumeric rating system in his final year.[24]
+After his application to the University of Texas School of Law was rejected, Bush entered Harvard Business School in the fall of 1973. He graduated in 1975 with an MBA degree. He is the only U.S. president to have earned an MBA.[25]
+Bush was engaged to Cathryn Lee Wolfman in 1967, but the engagement did not last. Bush and Wolfman remained on good terms after the end of the relationship.[26] While Bush was at a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a schoolteacher and librarian. After a three-month courtship, she accepted his marriage proposal and they wed on November 5 of that year.[27] The couple settled in Midland, Texas. Bush left his family's Episcopal Church to join his wife's United Methodist Church.[28] On November 25, 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna.[27]
+Prior to getting married, Bush struggled with multiple episodes of alcohol abuse.[29] In one instance on September 4, 1976, he was pulled over near his family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for driving under the influence of alcohol. He was cited for DUI, fined $150 (equivalent to $674 in 2019), and got his Maine driver's license briefly suspended.[30]
+Bush said his wife has had a stabilizing effect on his life,[27] and he attributes her influence to his 1986 decision to give up alcohol.[31] While Governor of Texas, Bush said of his wife, "I saw an elegant, beautiful woman who turned out not only to be elegant and beautiful, but very smart and willing to put up with my rough edges, and I must confess has smoothed them off over time."[27]
+Bush has been an avid reader throughout his adult life, preferring biographies and histories.[32] He read 14 Lincoln biographies, and during the last three years of his presidency, read 186 books. During his presidency, Bush read the Bible daily,[33] though at the end of his second term he said on television that he is "not a literalist" about Bible interpretation.[34] Walt Harrington, a journalist, recalled seeing "books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria" in his home when Bush was a Texas oilman. Other activities include cigar smoking and golf.[35] After leaving the White House, Bush took up oil painting.[36]
+In May 1968, Bush was commissioned into the Texas Air National Guard.[37] After two years of training in active-duty service,[38] he was assigned to Houston, flying Convair F-102s with the 147th Reconnaissance Wing out of the Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base.[37][39] Critics, including former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have alleged that Bush was favorably treated due to his father's political standing as a member of the House of Representatives, citing his selection as a pilot despite his low pilot aptitude test scores and his irregular attendance.[37] In June 2005, the United States Department of Defense released all the records of Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, which remain in its official archives.[40]
+In late 1972 and early 1973, he drilled with the 187th Fighter Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard. He had moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to work on the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton M. Blount.[41][42] In 1972, Bush was suspended from flying for failure to take a scheduled physical exam.[43] He was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserve on November 21, 1974.[44]
+In 1977, Bush established Arbusto Energy, a small oil exploration company, although it did not begin operations until the following year.[45][46] He later changed the name to Bush Exploration. In 1984, his company merged with the larger Spectrum 7, and Bush became chairman.[47] The company was hurt by decreased oil prices, and it folded into HKN, Inc.,[47][48] with Bush becoming a member of HKN's board of directors.[47] Questions of possible insider trading involving HKN arose, but a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation concluded that the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.[47][49]
+In April 1989, Bush arranged for a group of investors to purchase a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers baseball franchise for $89 million and invested $500,000 himself to start. He then served as managing general partner for five years.[50] He actively led the team's projects and regularly attended its games, often choosing to sit in the open stands with fans.[51] Bush's sale of his shares in the Rangers in 1998 brought him over $15 million from his initial $800,000 investment.[52]
+In 1978, Bush ran for the House of Representatives from Texas's 19th congressional district. The retiring member, George H. Mahon, had held the district for the Democratic Party since 1935. Bush's opponent, Kent Hance, portrayed him as out of touch with rural Texans, and Bush lost the election with 46.8 percent of the vote to Hance's 53.2 percent.[53]
+Bush and his family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1988 to work on his father's campaign for the U.S. presidency.[54][55] He served as a campaign advisor and liaison to the media, and assisted his father by campaigning across the country.[47] In December 1991, Bush was one of seven people named by his father to run his father's 1992 presidential re-election campaign, as a "campaign advisor".[56] The previous month, his father had asked him to tell White House chief of staff John H. Sununu he should resign.[57]
+Bush declared his candidacy for the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election at the same time his brother Jeb sought the governorship of Florida. His campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction, and education improvement.[47] Bush's campaign advisers were Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh, and Karl Rove.[58]
+After easily winning the Republican primary, Bush faced popular Democratic incumbent Governor Ann Richards.[47][59] In the course of the campaign, Bush pledged to sign a bill allowing Texans to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons. Richards had vetoed the bill, but Bush signed it into law after he became governor.[60] According to The Atlantic Monthly, the race "featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record – when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for 'appointing avowed homosexual activists' to state jobs".[61] The Atlantic, and others, connected the lesbian rumor to Karl Rove,[62] but Rove denied being involved.[63] Bush won the general election with 53.5 percent against Richards' 45.9 percent.[64]
+Bush used a budget surplus to push through Texas's largest tax-cut, $2 billion.[58] He extended government funding for organizations providing education of the dangers of alcohol and drug use and abuse, and helping to reduce domestic violence.[65] Critics contended that during his tenure, Texas ranked near the bottom in environmental evaluations. Supporters pointed to his efforts to raise the salaries of teachers and improve educational test scores.[47]
+In 1999, Bush signed a law that required electric retailers to buy a certain amount of energy from renewable sources (RPS),[66][67][68] which helped Texas eventually become the leading producer of wind powered electricity in the U.S.[69][70][71]
+In 1998, Bush won re-election with a record[47] 69 percent of the vote.[72] He became the first governor in Texas history to be elected to two consecutive four-year terms.[47] For most of Texas history, governors served two-year terms; a constitutional amendment extended those terms to four years starting in 1975.[73] In his second term, Bush promoted faith-based organizations and enjoyed high approval ratings.[47] He proclaimed June 10, 2000, to be Jesus Day in Texas, a day on which he urged all Texans to "answer the call to serve those in need".[74]
+Throughout Bush's first term, he was the focus of national attention as a potential future presidential candidate. Following his re-election, speculation soared, and within a year he decided to seek the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.[47]
+Incumbent Democratic president Bill Clinton was in his second and final term, and the field for nomination in both parties was wide open. Bush was the Governor of Texas in June 1999 when he announced his candidacy for president, joining John McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Orrin Hatch, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, John Kasich, and Bob Smith.
+Bush portrayed himself as a compassionate conservative, implying he was more centrist than other Republicans. He campaigned on a platform that included bringing integrity and honor back to the White House, increasing the size of the United States Armed Forces, cutting taxes, improving education, and aiding minorities.[47] By early 2000, the race had centered on Bush and McCain.[47]
+Bush won the Iowa caucuses, and although he was heavily favored to win the New Hampshire primary, he trailed McCain by 19 percent and lost that primary. Despite this, Bush regained momentum, and according to political observers, he effectively became the front runner after the South Carolina primary, which—according to The Boston Globe—made history for his campaign's negativity. The New York Times described it as a smear campaign.[75][76][77]
+On July 25, 2000, Bush surprised some observers when he selected Dick Cheney—a former White House Chief of Staff, U.S. Representative, and Secretary of Defense—to be his running mate. At the time, Cheney was serving as head of Bush's vice presidential search committee. Soon after at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Bush and Cheney were officially nominated by the Republican Party.
+Bush continued to campaign across the country and touted his record as Governor of Texas.[47] During his campaign, Bush criticized his Democratic opponent, incumbent Vice President Al Gore, over gun control and taxation.[78]
+When the election returns were tallied on November 7, Bush had won 29 states, including Florida. The closeness of the Florida outcome led to a recount.[47] The initial recount also went to Bush, but the outcome was tied up in lower courts for a month until eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.[79] On December 9, in the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling,[80] the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court decision that had ordered a third count, and stopped an ordered statewide hand recount based on the argument that the use of different standards among Florida's counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[47] The machine recount showed that Bush had won the Florida vote by a margin of 537 votes out of six million casts.[81] Although he had received 543,895 fewer individual nationwide votes than Gore, Bush won the election, receiving 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 (Gore had actually been awarded a total of 267 votes by the states pledged to him plus the District of Columbia, but one D.C. elector abstained). Bush was the first person to win an American presidential election with fewer popular votes than another candidate since Benjamin Harrison in 1888.[81]
+In his 2004 bid for re-election, Bush commanded broad support in the Republican Party and did not encounter a primary challenge. He appointed Ken Mehlman as campaign manager, and Karl Rove devised a political strategy.[82] Bush and the Republican platform emphasized a strong commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,[83] support for the USA PATRIOT Act,[84] a renewed shift in policy for constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-sex marriage,[83][85] reforming Social Security to create private investment accounts,[83] creation of an ownership society,[83] and opposing mandatory carbon emissions controls.[86] Bush also called for the implementation of a guest worker program for immigrants,[83] which was criticized by conservatives.[87]
+The Bush campaign advertised across the U.S. against Democratic candidates, including Bush's emerging opponent, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry and other Democrats attacked Bush on the Iraq War, and accused him of failing to stimulate the economy and job growth. The Bush campaign portrayed Kerry as a staunch liberal who would raise taxes and increase the size of government. The Bush campaign continuously criticized Kerry's seemingly contradictory statements on the war in Iraq,[47] and argued that Kerry lacked the decisiveness and vision necessary for success in the War on Terror.
+Following the resignation of CIA director George Tenet in 2004, Bush nominated Porter Goss to head the agency. The White House ordered Goss to purge agency officers who were disloyal to the administration.[88] After Goss' appointment, many of the CIA's senior agents were fired or quit. The CIA has been accused of deliberately leaking classified information to undermine the 2004 election.[89]
+In the election, Bush carried 31 of 50 states, receiving a total of 286 electoral votes. He won an absolute majority of the popular vote (50.7 percent to his opponent's 48.3 percent).[90] Bush's father George H.W. Bush was the previous president who won an absolute majority of the popular vote; he accomplished that feat in the 1988 election. Additionally, it was the first time since Herbert Hoover's election in 1928 that a Republican president was elected alongside re-elected Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress.
+Bush had originally outlined an ambitious domestic agenda, but his priorities were significantly altered following the September 11 attacks.[91] Wars were waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there were significant domestic debates regarding immigration, healthcare, Social Security, economic policy, and treatment of terrorist detainees. Over an eight-year period, Bush's once-high approval ratings[92] steadily declined, while his disapproval numbers increased significantly.[93] In 2007, the United States entered the longest post-World War II recession.[94]
+Bush took office during a period of economic recession in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble.[95] The terrorist attacks also impacted the economy.
+His administration increased federal government spending from $1.789 trillion to $2.983 trillion (60 percent), while revenues increased from $2.025 trillion to $2.524 trillion (from 2000 to 2008). Individual income tax revenues increased by 14 percent, corporate tax revenues by 50 percent, and customs and duties by 40 percent. Discretionary defense spending was increased by 107 percent, discretionary domestic spending by 62 percent, Medicare spending by 131 percent, social security by 51 percent, and income security spending by 130 percent. Cyclically adjusted, revenues rose by 35 percent and spending by 65 percent.[96] The increase in spending was more than under any predecessor since Lyndon B. Johnson.[97] The number of economic regulation governmental workers increased by 91,196.[98]
+The surplus in fiscal year 2000 was $237 billion—the third consecutive surplus and the largest surplus ever.[99] In 2001, Bush's budget estimated that there would be a $5.6 trillion surplus over the next ten years.[100] Facing congressional opposition, Bush held townhall style meetings across the U.S. in order to increase public support for his plan for a $1.35 trillion tax cut program—one of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history.[47] Bush argued that unspent government funds should be returned to taxpayers, saying "the surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money."[47] Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warned of a recession and Bush stated that a tax cut would stimulate the economy and create jobs.[101] Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, opposed some of the tax cuts on the basis that they would contribute to budget deficits and undermine Social Security.[102] O'Neill disputes the claim, made in Bush's book Decision Points, that he never openly disagreed with him on planned tax cuts.[103] By 2003, the economy showed signs of improvement, though job growth remained stagnant.[47] Another tax cut was passed that year.
+Between 2001 and 2008, GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.125 percent,[104] less than for past business cycles.[105] Bush entered office with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 10,587, and the average peaked in October 2007 at over 14,000. When Bush left office, the average was at 7,949, one of the lowest levels of his presidency.[106] Only four other U.S. presidents have left office with the stock market lower than when they began.[107]
+Unemployment originally rose from 4.2 percent in January 2001 to 6.3 percent in June 2003, but subsequently dropped to 4.5 percent in July 2007.[108] Adjusted for inflation, median household income dropped by $1,175 between 2000 and 2007,[109] while Professor Ken Homa of Georgetown University has noted that "Median real after-tax household income went up two percent".[110] The poverty rate increased from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.3 percent in 2006 after peaking at 12.7 percent in 2004.[111] By October 2008, due to increases in spending,[112]:273 the national debt had risen to $11.3 trillion,[113] an increase of over 100 percent from 2000 when the debt was only $5.6 trillion.[114][115] Most debt was accumulated as a result of what became known as the "Bush tax cuts" and increased national security spending.[116] In March 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama said when he voted against raising the debt ceiling: "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure."[117] By the end of Bush's presidency, unemployment climbed to 7.2 percent.[118]
+In December 2007, the United States entered the longest post–World War II recession,[94] caused by a housing market correction, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, and a declining dollar value.[119] In February 2008, 63,000 jobs were lost, a five-year record,[120] and in November, over 500,000 jobs were lost, which marked the largest loss of jobs in the United States in 34 years.[121] The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the last four months of 2008, 1.9 million jobs were lost.[122] By the end of 2008, the U.S. had lost a total of 2.6 million jobs.[123]
+To aid with the situation, Bush signed a $170 billion economic stimulus package which was intended to improve the economic situation by sending tax rebate checks to many Americans and providing tax breaks for struggling businesses. The Bush administration pushed for significantly increased regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003,[124] and after two years, the regulations passed the House but died in the Senate. Many Republican senators, as well as influential members of the Bush Administration, feared that the agency created by these regulations would merely be mimicking the private sector's risky practices.[125][126][127] In September 2008, the crisis became much more serious beginning with the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a federal bailout of American International Group for $85 billion.[128]
+Many economists and world governments determined that the situation had become the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.[129][130] Additional regulation over the housing market would have been beneficial, according to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.[131] Bush, meanwhile, proposed a financial rescue plan to buy back a large portion of the U.S. mortgage market.[132] Vince Reinhardt, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, said "it would have helped for the Bush administration to empower the folks at Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC to look at these issues more closely", and additionally, that it would have helped "for Congress to have held hearings".[126]
+Bush undertook a number of educational agendas, such as increasing the funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in his first years of office and creating education programs to strengthen the grounding in science and mathematics for American high school students. Funding for the NIH was cut in 2006, the first such cut in 36 years, due to rising inflation.[133]
+One of the administration's early major initiatives was the No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to measure and close the gap between rich and poor student performance, provide options to parents with students in low-performing schools, and target more federal funding to low-income schools. This landmark education initiative passed with broad bipartisan support, including that of Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.[134] It was signed into law by Bush in early 2002.[135] Many contend that the initiative has been successful, as cited by the fact that students in the U.S. have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since Bush signed "No Child Left Behind" into law.[136] Critics argue that it is underfunded[137] and that NCLBA's focus on "high-stakes testing" and quantitative outcomes is counterproductive.[138]
+In 2005, he announced a National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza to prepare the United States for a flu pandemic, which culminated in an implementation plan published by the Homeland Security Council in 2006.[139][140]
+After being re-elected, Bush signed into law a Medicare drug benefit program that, according to Jan Crawford, resulted in "the greatest expansion in America's welfare state in forty years" – the bill's costs approached $7 trillion.[112]:274 In 2007, Bush opposed and vetoed State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation, which was added by the Democrats onto a war funding bill and passed by Congress. The SCHIP legislation would have significantly expanded federally funded health care benefits and plans to children of some low-income families from about six million to ten million children. It was to be funded by an increase in the cigarette tax.[141] Bush viewed the legislation as a move toward socialized health care, and asserted that the program could benefit families making as much as $83,000 per year who did not need the help.[142]
+On May 21, 2008, Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).[143][144] The bill aimed to protect Americans against health insurance and employment discrimination based on a person's genetic information. The issue had been debated for 13 years before it finally became law. The measure is designed to protect citizens without hindering genetic research.
+Following Republican efforts to pass the Medicare Act of 2003, Bush signed the bill, which included major changes to the Medicare program by providing beneficiaries with some assistance in paying for prescription drugs, while relying on private insurance for the delivery of benefits.[145] The retired persons lobby group AARP worked with the Bush Administration on the program and gave their endorsement. Bush said the law, estimated to cost $400 billion over the first ten years, would give the elderly "better choices and more control over their health care".[146]
+Bush began his second term by outlining a major initiative to "reform" Social Security,[147] which was facing record deficit projections beginning in 2005. Bush made it the centerpiece of his domestic agenda despite opposition from some in the U.S. Congress.[147] In his 2005 State of the Union Address, Bush discussed the potential impending bankruptcy of the program and outlined his new program, which included partial privatization of the system, personal Social Security accounts, and options to permit Americans to divert a portion of their Social Security tax (FICA) into secured investments.[147] Democrats opposed the proposal to partially privatize the system.[147]
+Bush embarked on a 60-day national tour, campaigning for his initiative in media events known as "Conversations on Social Security" in an attempt to gain public support.[148] Nevertheless, public support for the proposal declined,[149] and the House Republican leadership decided not to put Social Security reform on the priority list for the remainder of their 2005 legislative agenda.[150] The proposal's legislative prospects were further diminished by autumn 2005 due to political fallout from the response to Hurricane Katrina.[151] After the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, there was no prospect of further congressional action on the Bush proposal for the remainder of his term in office.
+Upon taking office in 2001, Bush stated his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which seeks to impose mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, citing that the treaty exempted 80 percent of the world's population[152] and would have cost tens of billions of dollars per year.[153] He also cited that the Senate had voted 95–0 in 1997 on a resolution expressing its disapproval of the protocol.
+In May 2001, Bush signed an executive order to create an interagency task force to streamline energy projects,[154] and later signed two other executive orders to tackle environmental issues.[155]
+In 2002, Bush announced the Clear Skies Act of 2003,[156] which aimed at amending the Clean Air Act to reduce air pollution through the use of emissions trading programs. Many experts argued that this legislation would have weakened the original legislation by allowing higher emission rates of pollutants than were previously legal.[157] The initiative was introduced to Congress, but failed to make it out of committee.
+Later in 2006, Bush declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, creating the largest marine reserve to date. The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument comprises 84 million acres (340,000 km2) and is home to 7,000 species of fish, birds, and other marine animals, many of which are specific to only those islands.[158] The move was hailed by conservationists for "its foresight and leadership in protecting this incredible area".[159]
+Bush has said he believes that global warming is real[160] and has noted that it is a serious problem, but he asserted there is a "debate over whether it's man-made or naturally caused".[161] The Bush Administration's stance on global warming remained controversial in the scientific and environmental communities. Critics have alleged that the administration[162] misinformed the public and did not do enough to reduce carbon emissions and deter global warming.[163]
+In his 2006 State of the Union Address, Bush declared, "America is addicted to oil" and announced his Advanced Energy Initiative to increase energy development research.[164]
+In his 2007 State of the Union Address, Bush renewed his pledge to work toward diminished reliance on foreign oil by reducing fossil fuel consumption and increasing alternative fuel production.[165] Amid high gasoline prices in 2008, Bush lifted a ban on offshore drilling.[166] However, the move was largely symbolic because there was still a federal law banning offshore drilling. Bush said, "This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil reserves is action from the U.S. Congress."[166] Bush had said in June 2008, "In the long run, the solution is to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative energy technologies. My administration has worked with Congress to invest in gas-saving technologies like advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cells ... In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production."[167]
+In his 2008 State of the Union Address, Bush announced that the U.S. would commit $2 billion over the next three years to a new international fund to promote clean energy technologies and fight climate change, saying, "Along with contributions from other countries, this fund will increase and accelerate the deployment of all forms of cleaner, more efficient technologies in developing nations like India and China, and help leverage substantial private-sector capital by making clean energy projects more financially attractive." He also announced plans to reaffirm the United States' commitment to work with major economies, and, through the UN, to complete an international agreement that will slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases; he stated, "This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride."[168]
+Federal funding for medical research involving the creation or destruction of human embryos through the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health has been forbidden by law since the passage of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment in 1995.[169] Bush has said he supports adult stem cell research and has supported federal legislation that finances adult stem cell research. However, Bush did not support embryonic stem cell research.[170] On August 9, 2001, Bush signed an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for the 71 existing "lines" of stem cells,[171] but the ability of these existing lines to provide an adequate medium for testing has been questioned. Testing can be done on only 12 of the original lines, and all approved lines have been cultured in contact with mouse cells, which creates safety issues that complicate development and approval of therapies from these lines.[172] On July 19, 2006, Bush used his veto power for the first time in his presidency to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. The bill would have repealed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, thereby permitting federal money to be used for research where stem cells are derived from the destruction of an embryo.[173]
+Nearly 8 million immigrants came to the United States from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation's history.[174] Almost half entered illegally.[175] In 2006, Bush urged Congress to allow more than 12 million illegal immigrants to work in the United States with the creation of a "temporary guest-worker program". Bush also urged Congress to provide additional funds for border security and committed to deploying 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexico–United States border.[176] From May to June 2007, Bush strongly supported the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which was written by a bipartisan group of Senators with the active participation of the Bush administration.[177] The bill envisioned a legalization program for illegal immigrants, with an eventual path to citizenship; establishing a guest worker program; a series of border and work site enforcement measures; a reform of the green card application process and the introduction of a point-based "merit" system for green cards; elimination of "chain migration" and of the Diversity Immigrant Visa; and other measures. Bush argued that the lack of legal status denies the protections of U.S. laws to millions of people who face dangers of poverty and exploitation, and penalizes employers despite a demand for immigrant labor.[178] Bush contended that the proposed bill did not amount to amnesty.[179]
+A heated public debate followed, which resulted in a substantial rift within the Republican Party, most conservatives opposed it because of its legalization or amnesty provisions.[180] The bill was eventually defeated in the Senate on June 28, 2007, when a cloture motion failed on a 46–53 vote.[181] Bush expressed disappointment upon the defeat of one of his signature domestic initiatives.[182] The Bush administration later proposed a series of immigration enforcement measures that do not require a change in law.[183]
+On September 19, 2010, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Bush offered to accept 100,000 Palestinian refugees as American citizens if a permanent settlement had been reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.[184]
+Hurricane Katrina struck early in Bush's second term and was one of the most damaging natural disasters in U.S. history. Katrina formed in late August during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and devastated much of the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States, particularly New Orleans.[185]
+Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 27[186] and in Mississippi and Alabama the following day.[187] He authorized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to manage the disaster, but his announcement failed to spur these agencies to action.[188] The eye of the hurricane made landfall on August 29, and New Orleans began to flood due to levee breaches; later that day, Bush declared a major disaster in Louisiana,[189] officially authorizing FEMA to start using federal funds to assist in the recovery effort.
+On August 30, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declared it "an incident of national significance",[190] triggering the first use of the newly created National Response Plan. Three days later, on September 2, National Guard troops first entered the city of New Orleans.[191] The same day, Bush toured parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and declared that the success of the recovery effort up to that point was "not enough".[192]
+As the disaster in New Orleans intensified, critics charged that Bush was misrepresenting his administration's role in what they saw as a flawed response. Leaders attacked Bush for having appointed apparently incompetent leaders to positions of power at FEMA, notably Michael D. Brown;[193] it was also argued that the federal response was limited as a result of the Iraq War[194] and Bush himself did not act upon warnings of floods.[195][196] Bush responded to mounting criticism by accepting full responsibility for the federal government's failures in its handling of the emergency.[191] It has been argued that with Katrina, Bush passed a political tipping point from which he would not recover.[197]
+During Bush's second term, a controversy arose over the Justice Department's midterm dismissal of seven United States Attorneys.[198] The White House maintained that the U.S. attorneys were fired for poor performance.[199] Attorney General Alberto Gonzales later resigned over the issue, along with other senior members of the Justice Department.[200][201] The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas for advisers Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten to testify regarding this matter, but Bush directed Miers and Bolten to not comply with those subpoenas, invoking his right of executive privilege. Bush maintained that all his advisers were protected under a broad executive privilege protection to receive candid advice. The Justice Department determined that the President's order was legal.[202]
+Although Congressional investigations focused on whether the Justice Department and the White House were using the U.S. Attorney positions for political advantage, no official findings have been released. On March 10, 2008, the Congress filed a federal lawsuit to enforce their issued subpoenas.[203] On July 31, 2008, a United States district court judge ruled that Bush's top advisers were not immune from Congressional subpoenas.[204]
+In all, twelve Justice Department officials resigned rather than testify under oath before Congress. They included Attorney General Alberto Gonzales[205] and his chief of staff Kyle Sampson,[206] Gonzales' liaison to the White House Monica Goodling,[207] aide to the president Karl Rove[208] and his senior aide Sara Taylor.[209] In addition, legal counsel to the president Harriet Miers[210] and deputy chief of staff to the president Joshua Bolten[211] were both found in contempt of Congress.[209]
+In 2010, the Justice Department investigator concluded that though political considerations did play a part in as many as four of the attorney firings,[212] the firings were "inappropriately political", but not criminal. According to the prosecutors, there was insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution for any criminal offense.[213]
+During his presidential campaign, Bush's foreign policy platform included support for stronger economic and political relationship with Latin America, especially Mexico, and a reduction of involvement in "nation-building" and other small-scale military engagements. The administration pursued a national missile defense.[214] Bush was an advocate of China's entry into the World Trade Organization.[215]
+After the September 11 attacks on New York, Bush launched the War on Terror, in which the United States military and a small international coalition invaded Afghanistan. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush referred to an "axis of evil" consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.[216] In 2003, Bush then launched the invasion of Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction, which he described as being part of the War on Terrorism.[217] Those invasions led to the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.[218]
+Bush began his second term with an emphasis on improving strained relations with European nations. He appointed long-time adviser Karen Hughes to oversee a global public relations campaign. Bush lauded the pro-democracy struggles in Georgia and Ukraine.[219]
+In March 2006, Bush reversed decades of U.S. policy when he visited the Republic of India in a trip focused particularly on areas of nuclear energy, counter-terrorism co-operation; and discussions that would eventually lead to the India–United States Civil Nuclear Agreement.[220][221] This was in stark contrast to the stance taken by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, whose approach and response to India after the 1998 nuclear tests has been characterized as "sanctions and hectoring".[222]
+Midway through Bush's second term, questions arose whether Bush was retreating from his freedom and democracy agenda, which was highlighted in policy changes toward some oil-rich former Soviet republics in central Asia.[223]
+In an address before both Houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush thanked the nations of the world for their support following the September 11 attacks. He specifically thanked UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for traveling to Washington to show "unity of purpose with America", and said "America has no truer friend than Great Britain."[224]
+The September 11 terrorist attacks were a major turning point in Bush's presidency. That evening, he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising a strong response to the attacks. He also emphasized the need for the nation to come together and comfort the families of the victims. Three days after the attacks, Bush visited Ground Zero and met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firefighters, police officers, and volunteers. To much applause, Bush addressed the gathering via a megaphone while standing in a heap of rubble: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."[225]
+In a September 20 speech, Bush condemned Osama bin Laden and his organization Al-Qaeda, and issued an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating, to "hand over the terrorists, or ... share in their fate".[226]
+After September 11, Bush announced a global War on Terror. The Afghan Taliban regime was not forthcoming with Osama bin Laden, so Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime.[227] In his January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address, he asserted that an "axis of evil" consisting of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq was "arming to threaten the peace of the world" and "pose[d] a grave and growing danger".[228] The Bush Administration asserted both a right and the intention to wage preemptive war, or preventive war.[229] This became the basis for the Bush Doctrine which weakened the unprecedented levels of international and domestic support for the United States which had followed the September 11 attacks.[230]
+Dissent and criticism of Bush's leadership in the War on Terror increased as the war in Iraq continued.[231][232][233] In 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq War had become the "cause célèbre for jihadists".[234][235]
+On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces initiated bombing campaigns that led to the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in Kabul on November 13. The main goals of the war were to defeat the Taliban, drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and capture key al-Qaeda leaders. In December 2001, the Pentagon reported that the Taliban had been defeated,[236] but cautioned that the war would go on to continue weakening Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.[236] Later that month the UN had installed the Afghan Transitional Administration chaired by Hamid Karzai.[237][238]
+Efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden failed as he escaped a battle in December 2001 in the mountainous region of Tora Bora, which the Bush Administration later acknowledged to have resulted from a failure to commit enough U.S. ground troops.[239] It was not until May 2011, two years after Bush left office, that bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces under the Obama administration. Bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains at large.
+Despite the initial success in driving the Taliban from power in Kabul, by early 2003 the Taliban was regrouping, amassing new funds and recruits.[240] The 2005 failure of Operation Red Wings showed that the Taliban had returned.[241] In 2006, the Taliban insurgency appeared larger, fiercer and better organized than expected, with large-scale allied offensives such as Operation Mountain Thrust attaining limited success.[242][243][244] As a result, Bush commissioned 3,500 additional troops to the country in March 2007.[245]
+Beginning with his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began publicly focusing attention on Iraq, which he labeled as part of an "axis of evil" allied with terrorists and posing "a grave and growing danger" to U.S. interests through possession of weapons of mass destruction.[228][246]
+In the latter half of 2002, CIA reports contained assertions of Saddam Hussein's intent of reconstituting nuclear weapons programs, not properly accounting for Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, and that some Iraqi missiles had a range greater than allowed by the UN sanctions.[247][248] Contentions that the Bush Administration manipulated or exaggerated the threat and evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities would eventually become a major point of criticism for the president.[249][250]
+In late 2002 and early 2003, Bush urged the United Nations to enforce Iraqi disarmament mandates, precipitating a diplomatic crisis. In November 2002, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei led UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, but were advised by the U.S. to depart the country four days prior to the U.S. invasion, despite their requests for more time to complete their tasks.[251] The U.S. initially sought a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of military force but dropped the bid for UN approval due to vigorous opposition from several countries.[252] The Bush administration's claim that the Iraq War was part of the War on Terror had been questioned and contested by political analysts.[253]
+More than 20 nations (most notably the United Kingdom), designated the "coalition of the willing" joined the United States[254] in invading Iraq. They launched the invasion on March 20, 2003. The Iraqi military was quickly defeated. The capital, Baghdad, fell on April 9, 2003. On May 1, Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The initial success of U.S. operations increased his popularity, but the U.S. and allied forces faced a growing insurgency led by sectarian groups; Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech was later criticized as premature.[255] From 2004 until 2007, the situation in Iraq deteriorated further, with some observers arguing that there was a full-scale civil war in Iraq.[256] Bush's policies met with criticism, including demands domestically to set a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq. The 2006 report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, concluded that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating". While Bush admitted there were strategic mistakes made in regards to the stability of Iraq,[257] he maintained he would not change the overall Iraq strategy.[258][259] According to Iraq Body Count, some 251,000 Iraqis have been killed in the civil war following the U.S.-led invasion, including at least 163,841 civilians.[260]
+In January 2005, free, democratic elections were held in Iraq for the first time in 50 years.[261] According to Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffak al-Rubaie, "This is the greatest day in the history of this country."[261] Bush praised the event as well, saying that the Iraqis "have taken rightful control of their country's destiny".[261] This led to the election of Jalal Talabani as president and Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister of Iraq. A referendum to approve a constitution in Iraq was held in October 2005, supported by most Shiites and many Kurds.[262]
+On January 10, 2007, Bush announced a surge of 21,500 more troops for Iraq, as well as a job program for Iraqis, more reconstruction proposals, and $1.2 billion (equivalent to $1.5 billion in 2019) for these programs.[263] On May 1, 2007, Bush used his second-ever veto to reject a bill setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops,[264] saying the debate over the conflict was "understandable" but insisting that a continued U.S. presence there was crucial.[265]
+In March 2008, Bush praised the Iraqi government's "bold decision" to launch the Battle of Basra against the Mahdi Army, calling it "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq".[266] He said he would carefully weigh recommendations from his commanding General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about how to proceed after the end of the military buildup in the summer of 2008. He also praised the Iraqis' legislative achievements, including a pension law, a revised de-Baathification law, a new budget, an amnesty law, and a provincial powers measure that, he said, set the stage for the Iraqi elections.[267] By July 2008, American troop deaths had reached their lowest number since the war began,[268] and due to increased stability in Iraq, Bush announced the withdrawal of additional American forces.[268] During his last visit in Iraq in December 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw both of his shoes to Bush amid official press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.[269] Al-Zaidi yelled the strikes on Bush as "farewell kiss" and "for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq."[270]
+In March 2010, Center for Public Integrity released a report that President Bush's administration had made more than 900 false pretenses in a two-year period about alleged threat of Iraq against the United States, as his rationale to engage war in Iraq.[271] Senior war crimes prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz has suggested that Bush should be tried in the International Criminal Court for '269 war crime charges' related to the Iraq War.[272][273]
+Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush issued an executive order that authorized the President's Surveillance Program. The new directive allowed the National Security Agency to monitor communications between suspected terrorists outside the U.S. and parties within the U.S. without obtaining a warrant, which previously had been required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[274] As of 2009[update], the other provisions of the program remained highly classified.[275] Once the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel questioned its original legal opinion that FISA did not apply in a time of war, the program was subsequently re-authorized by the President on the basis that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists.[276] The program proved to be controversial; critics of the administration and organizations such as the American Bar Association argued that it was illegal.[277] In August 2006, a U.S. district court judge ruled that the NSA electronic surveillance program was unconstitutional,[278] but on July 6, 2007, that ruling was vacated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing.[279] On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders that the program would not be reauthorized by the President, but would be subjected to judicial oversight.[280] Later in 2007, the NSA launched a replacement for the program, referred to as PRISM, which was subject to the oversight of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[281] This program was not publicly revealed until reports by The Washington Post[281] and The Guardian[282] emerged in June 2013.[281]
+Bush authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and several other "enhanced interrogation techniques" that several critics, including Barack Obama, would label as torture.[283][284][285][286] Between 2002 and 2003, the CIA considered certain enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to be legal based on secret Justice Department legal opinions arguing that terror detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture, which was described as "an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war".[287][288] The CIA had exercised the technique on certain key terrorist suspects under authority given to it in the Bybee Memo from the Attorney General, though that memo was later withdrawn.[289] While not permitted by the U.S. Army Field Manuals which assert "that harsh interrogation tactics elicit unreliable information",[287] the Bush administration believed these enhanced interrogations "provided critical information" to preserve American lives.[290] Critics, such as former CIA officer Bob Baer, have stated that information was suspect, "you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough."[291]
+On October 17, 2006, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law.[292] The new rule was enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006),[293] which allowed the U.S. government to prosecute unlawful enemy combatants by military commission rather than a standard trial. The law also denied the detainees access to habeas corpus and barred the torture of prisoners. The provision of the law allowed the president to determine what constitutes "torture".[292]
+On March 8, 2008, Bush vetoed H.R. 2082,[294] a bill that would have expanded congressional oversight over the intelligence community and banned the use of waterboarding as well as other forms of interrogation not permitted under the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, saying that "the bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the War on Terror".[295] In April 2009, the ACLU sued and won release of the secret memos that had authorized the Bush administration's interrogation tactics.[296] One memo detailed specific interrogation tactics including a footnote that described waterboarding as torture as well as that the form of waterboarding used by the CIA was far more intense than authorized by the Justice Department.[297]
+Bush publicly condemned Kim Jong-il of North Korea and identified North Korea as one of three states in an "axis of evil". He said that "the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."[228] Within months, "both countries had walked away from their respective commitments under the U.S.–DPRK Agreed Framework of October 1994."[298] North Korea's October 9, 2006, detonation of a nuclear device further complicated Bush's foreign policy, which centered for both terms of his presidency on "[preventing] the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world".[228] Bush condemned North Korea's position, reaffirmed his commitment to "a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula", and said that "transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States", for which North Korea would be held accountable.[299] On May 7, 2007, North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactors immediately pending the release of frozen funds held in a foreign bank account. This was a result of a series of three-way talks initiated by the United States and including China.[300] On September 2, 2007, North Korea agreed to disclose and dismantle all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007.[301] By May 2009, North Korea had restarted its nuclear program and threatened to attack South Korea.[302]
+On June 22, 2010, "While South Korea prospers, the people of North Korea have suffered profoundly," he said, adding that communism had resulted in dire poverty, mass starvation and brutal suppression. "In recent years," he went on to say, "the suffering has been compounded by the leader who wasted North Korea's precious few resources on personal luxuries and nuclear weapons programs."[303]
+Bush expanded economic sanctions on Syria.[304] In 2003, Bush signed the Syria Accountability Act, which expanded sanctions on Syria. In early 2007, the Treasury Department, acting on a June 2005 executive order, froze American bank accounts of Syria's Higher Institute of Applied Science and Technology, Electronics Institute, and National Standards and Calibration Laboratory. Bush's order prohibits Americans from doing business with these institutions suspected of helping spread weapons of mass destruction[305] and being supportive of terrorism.[306] Under separate executive orders signed by Bush in 2004 and later 2007, the Treasury Department froze the assets of two Lebanese and two Syrians, accusing them of activities to "undermine the legitimate political process in Lebanon" in November 2007. Those designated included: Assaad Halim Hardan, a member of Lebanon's parliament and current leader of the Syrian Socialist National Party; Wi'am Wahhab, a former member of Lebanon's government (Minister of the Environment) under Prime Minister Omar Karami (2004–2005); Hafiz Makhluf, a colonel and senior official in the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate and a cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and Muhammad Nasif Khayrbik, identified as a close adviser to Assad.[307]
+In the State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush outlined a five-year strategy for global emergency AIDS relief, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Bush announced $15 billion for this effort[308] which directly supported life-saving antiretroviral treatment for more than 3.2 million men, women and children worldwide.[309] The U.S. government had spent some $44 billion on the project since 2003 (a figure that includes $7 billion contributed to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a multilateral organization),[310] which saved an estimated five million lives.[311] According to The New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, "Bush did more to stop AIDS and more to help Africa than any president before or since."[311]
+On May 10, 2005, Vladimir Arutyunian, a native Georgian who was born to a family of ethnic Armenians, threw a live hand grenade toward a podium where Bush was speaking at Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was seated nearby. It landed in the crowd about 65 feet (20 m) from the podium after hitting a girl, but it did not detonate. Arutyunian was arrested in July 2005, confessed, was convicted and was given a life sentence in January 2006.[312]
+Bush withdrew U.S. support for several international agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia. He also signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia.
+Bush emphasized a careful approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; he denounced Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat for his support of violence, but sponsored dialogues between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush supported Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan, and lauded the democratic elections held in Palestine after Arafat's death.
+In July 2001, Bush visited Pope John Paul II at Castel Gandolfo.[313]
+Bush also expressed U.S. support for the defense of Taiwan following the stand-off in April 2001 with the People's Republic of China over the Hainan Island incident, when an EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided with a People's Liberation Army Air Force jet, leading to the detention of U.S. personnel. From 2003 to 2004, Bush authorized U.S. military intervention in Haiti and Liberia to protect U.S. interests. Bush condemned the militia attacks Darfur and denounced the killings in Sudan as genocide.[314] Bush said an international peacekeeping presence was critical in Darfur, but he opposed referring the situation to the International Criminal Court.
+On June 10, 2007, Bush met with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and became the first president to visit Albania.[315] Bush has voiced his support for the independence of Kosovo.[316] Bush opposed South Ossetia's independence.[317] On August 15, 2008, Bush said of Russia's invasion of the country of Georgia: "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."[318]
+Bush opened the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Departing from previous practice, he stood among a group of U.S. athletes rather than from a ceremonial stand or box, saying: "On behalf of a proud, determined, and grateful nation, I declare open the Games of Salt Lake City, celebrating the Olympic Winter Games."[319] In 2008, in the course of a good-will trip to Asia, he attended the Summer Olympics in Beijing.[320]
+Bush twice invoked Section 3 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows a president to temporarily transfer the powers and duties of his office to the vice president, who then becomes acting president. On June 29, 2002, Bush underwent a colonoscopy and chose to invoke Section 3 of the amendment, making Vice President Dick Cheney the acting president. The medical procedure began at 7:09 am. EDT and ended at 7:29 am. EDT. Bush woke up twenty minutes later, but did not resume his presidential powers and duties until 9:24 am. EDT after the president's doctor, Richard Tubb, conducted an overall examination. Tubb said he recommended the additional time to make sure the sedative had no after effects. On July 21, 2007, Bush again invoked Section 3 in response to having to undergo a colonoscopy, again making Vice President Cheney the acting president. Bush invoked Section 3 at 7:16 a.m. EDT. He reclaimed his powers at 9:21 a.m. EDT. In both cases, Bush specifically cited Section 3 when he transferred the presidential powers to the Vice President and when he reclaimed those powers.[321]
+Following the announcement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement on July 1, 2005, Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed her. On September 5, following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, this nomination was withdrawn and Bush instead nominated Roberts for Chief Justice to succeed Rehnquist. Roberts was confirmed by the Senate as the 17th Chief Justice on September 29, 2005.
+On October 3, 2005, Bush nominated long time White House Counsel Harriet Miers for O'Connor's position. After facing significant opposition from both parties, who found her to be ill-prepared and uninformed on the law,[112]:278 Miers asked that her name be withdrawn on October 27. Four days later, on October 31, Bush nominated federal appellate judge Samuel Alito. Alito was confirmed as the 110th Supreme Court Justice on January 31, 2006.[322]
+In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 61 judges to the United States courts of appeals and 261 judges to the United States district courts. Each of these numbers, along with his total of 324 judicial appointments, is third in American history, behind both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Bush experienced a number of judicial appointment controversies. Debate during one confirmation session lasted "39 stupefying hours" according to The New York Times. On August 3, 2001, the Senate did not consent to keep existing nominations in status quo, returning 40 judicial nominations, and 164 total nominations.[323][324][325]
+At the outset, Judicature magazine noted that the "Senate Democrats were gearing up for the approaching confirmation hearings" before the first set of nominees were sent to the Senate. It then cites The New York Times as saying "Senate Democrats have pledged they will not automatically vote to confirm Mr. Bush's judicial nominees and will subject them to intense scrutiny."[326]
+The Senate had confirmed only eight of Bush's 60 judicial nominations by October 2001. In February 2003, the Democrats successfully filibustered the nomination of Miguel Estrada.[327]
+Bush's upbringing in West Texas, his accent, his vacations on his Texas ranch, and his penchant for country metaphors contribute to his folksy, American cowboy image.[328][329] "I think people look at him and think John Wayne", said Piers Morgan, editor of the British Daily Mirror.[330]
+Bush has been parodied by the media,[331] comedians, and other politicians.[332] Detractors tended to cite linguistic errors made by Bush during his public speeches, which are colloquially referred to as Bushisms.[333]
+In contrast to his father—who was perceived as having troubles with an overarching unifying theme—Bush embraced larger visions and was seen as a man of larger ideas and associated huge risks.[334]
+Tony Blair wrote in 2010 that the caricature of Bush as being dumb is "ludicrous" and that Bush is "very smart".[335] In an interview with Playboy, The New York Times columnist David Brooks said Bush "was 60 IQ points smarter in private than he was in public. He doesn't want anybody to think he's smarter than they are, so puts on a Texas act."[336]
+Bush began his presidency with approval ratings near 50 percent.[337] After the September 11 attacks, Bush gained an approval rating of 90 percent,[338] maintaining 80 to 90 percent approval for four months after the attacks. It remained over 50 percent during most of his first term[8] and then fell to as low as 19 percent in his second term.[339]
+In 2000 and again in 2004, Time magazine named George W. Bush as its Person of the Year, a title awarded to someone who the editors believe "has done the most to influence the events of the year".[340] In May 2004, Gallup reported that 89 percent of the Republican electorate approved of Bush.[341] However, the support waned due mostly to a minority of Republicans' frustration with him on issues of spending, illegal immigration, and Middle Eastern affairs.[342]
+Within the United States armed forces, according to an unscientific survey, the president was strongly supported in the 2004 presidential elections.[343] While 73 percent of military personnel said they would vote for Bush, 18 percent preferred his Democratic rival, John Kerry.[343] According to Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who has studied the political leanings of the U.S. military, members of the armed services supported Bush because they found him more likely than Kerry to complete the War in Iraq.[343]
+Bush's approval rating went below the 50 percent mark in AP-Ipsos polling in December 2004.[344] Thereafter, his approval ratings and approval of his handling of domestic and foreign policy issues steadily dropped. After his re-election in 2004, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum[4][5][345] for his handling of the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina,[6][7][346] and to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance, the Plame affair, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp controversies.[347]
+Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Polls conducted in 2006 showed an average of 37 percent approval ratings for Bush,[348] the lowest for any second-term president at that point in his term since Harry S. Truman in March 1951 (when Truman's approval rating was 28 percent),[344][349] which contributed to what Bush called the "thumping" of the Republican Party in the 2006 mid-term elections.[350] Throughout most of 2007, Bush's approval rating hovered in the mid-thirties;[351] the average for his entire second term was 37 percent, according to Gallup.[352]
+By the beginning of 2008, his final year in office, Bush's approval rating had dropped to a low of just 19 percent, largely from the loss of support among Republicans.[339] Commenting on his low poll numbers and accusations of being "the worst president,"[353][354] Bush would say, "I make decisions on what I think is right for the United States based upon principles. I frankly don't give a damn about the polls."[355]
+There were calls for Bush's impeachment, though most polls showed a plurality of Americans would not support such an action.[356] The arguments offered for impeachment usually centered on the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy,[357] the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq, and alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions.[358] Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who had run against Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign, introduced 35 articles of impeachment on the floor of the House of Representatives against Bush on June 9, 2008, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared that impeachment was "off the table".[359]
+In April 2008, Bush's disapproval ratings reached the highest ever recorded for any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup poll, with 69 percent of those polled disapproving of the job Bush was doing as president and 28 percent approving—although the majority (66 percent) of Republicans still approved of his job performance.[360]
+In polls conducted in the fall, just before the 2008 election, his approval ratings remained at record lows of 19 to 20 percent,[361][362] while his disapproval ratings ranged from 67 percent to as high as 75 percent.[362][363] In polling conducted January 9–11, 2009, his final job approval rating by Gallup was 34 percent, which placed him on par with Jimmy Carter and Harry S. Truman, the other presidents whose final Gallup ratings measured in the low 30s (Richard Nixon's final Gallup approval rating was even lower, at 24 percent).[364] According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted January 11–15, 2009, Bush's final approval rating in office was 22 percent, the lowest in American history.[361]
+Bush was criticized internationally and targeted by the global anti-war and anti-globalization movements for his administration's foreign policy.[365][366] Views of him within the international community—even in France, a close ally of the United States—were more negative than those of most previous American presidents.[367]
+Bush was described as having especially close personal relationships with Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and Vicente Fox of Mexico, although formal relations were sometimes strained.[368][369][370] Other leaders, such as Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan,[371] Yoweri Museveni of Uganda,[372] José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain,[373] and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,[374] openly criticized the president. Later in Bush's presidency, tensions arose between him and Vladimir Putin, which led to a cooling of their relationship.[375]
+In 2006, most respondents in 18 of 21 countries surveyed around the world were found to hold an unfavorable opinion of Bush. Respondents indicated that they judged his administration as negative for world security.[376][377] In 2007, the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported that during the Bush presidency, attitudes towards the United States, and towards Americans, became less favorable around the world.[378] The Pew Research Center's 2007 Global Attitudes poll found that in only nine countries of 47 did most respondents express "a lot of confidence" or "some confidence" in Bush: Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Israel, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, and Uganda.[379] A March 2007 survey of Arab opinion conducted by Zogby International and the University of Maryland found that Bush was the most disliked leader in the Arab world.[380]
+During a June 2007 visit to the predominantly Muslim[381] Albania, Bush was greeted enthusiastically. Albania has a population of 2.8 million,[382] has troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country's government is highly supportive of American foreign policy.[383] A huge image of the President was hung in the middle of the capital city of Tirana flanked by Albanian and American flags while a local street was named after him.[384][385] A shirt-sleeved statue of Bush was unveiled in Fushë-Krujë, a few kilometers northwest of Tirana.[386] The Bush administration's support for the independence of Albanian-majority Kosovo, while endearing him to the Albanians, has troubled U.S. relations with Serbia, leading to the February 2008 torching of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade.[387]
+On May 7, 2005, during an official state visit to Latvia, Bush was awarded the Order of the Three Stars presented to him by President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga.[388] A few places outside the United States bear Bush's name. In 2005, the Tbilisi City Council voted to rename a street in honor of the U.S. president.[389] Previously known as Melaani Drive, the street links the Georgian capital's airport with the city center and was used by Bush's motorcade during his visit four months earlier.[390] A street in Tirana, formerly known as Rruga Punëtorët e Rilindjes, situated directly outside the Albanian Parliament, was renamed after Bush a few days before he made the first-ever visit by an American president to Albania in June 2007.[391] In Jerusalem, a small plaza with a monument bearing his name is also dedicated to Bush.[392]
+In 2012, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves awarded Bush the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana for his work in expanding NATO.[393]
+Two elementary schools are named after him: George W. Bush Elementary School of the Stockton Unified School District in Stockton, California,[394] and George W. Bush Elementary School of the Wylie Independent School District in St. Paul, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.[395]
+Following the inauguration of Barack Obama, Bush and his family flew from Andrews Air Force Base to a homecoming celebration in Midland, Texas, following which they returned to their ranch in Crawford, Texas.[396] They bought a home in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, where they settled down.[397]
+He makes regular appearances at various events throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area, most notably when he conducted the opening coin toss at the Dallas Cowboys first game in the team's new stadium in Arlington[398] and an April 2009 visit to a Texas Rangers game, where he thanked the people of Dallas for helping him settle in and was met with a standing ovation.[399] He also attended every home playoff game for the Texas Rangers 2010 season and, accompanied by his father, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington for Game 4 of the 2010 World Series on October 31, 2010.[400]
+On August 6, 2013, Bush was successfully treated for a coronary artery blockage with a stent. The blockage had been found during an annual medical examination.[401]
+In reaction to the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers, Bush stated: "Laura and I are heartbroken by the heinous acts of violence in our city last night. Murdering the innocent is always evil, never more so than when the lives taken belong to those who protect our families and communities."[402]
+Since leaving office, Bush has kept a relatively low profile[403] though he has made public appearances, most notably after the release of his memoirs in 2010 and for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2011. In March 2009, he delivered his first post-presidency speech in Calgary, Alberta,[404][405] appeared via video on The Colbert Report during which he praised U.S. troops for earning a "special place in American history,"[406] and attended the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy.[407] Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker on October 26 at the "Get Motivated" seminar in Dallas.[408] In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting on November 5, 2009, the Bushes paid an undisclosed visit to the survivors and the victims' families the day following the shooting, having contacted the base commander requesting that the visit be private and not involve press coverage.[409]
+Bush released his memoirs, Decision Points, on November 9, 2010. During a pre-release appearance promoting the book, Bush said he considered his biggest accomplishment to be keeping "the country safe amid a real danger", and his greatest failure to be his inability to secure the passage of Social Security reform.[410] He also made news defending his administration's enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "I'd do it again to save lives."[411]
+In 2012, he wrote the foreword of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, an economics book published by the George W. Bush Presidential Center.[412][413] He also presented the book at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas.[414]
+Bush appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on November 19, 2013, along with the former First Lady, Laura Bush. When asked by Leno why he does not comment publicly about the Obama administration, Bush said, "I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor."[415] Despite this statement, on April 25, 2015, Bush criticized President Obama at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Bush criticized Obama's handling of Iran, specifically with respect to sanctions and a nuclear deal, saying: "You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That's how Americans should view the deal." Bush also attacked Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, calling it a "strategic blunder", borrowing a term that had been used by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.[416]
+Alongside the 2014 United States–Africa Leaders Summit, Bush, Michelle Obama, the State Department, and the George W. Bush Institute hosted a daylong forum on education and health with the spouses of the African leaders attending the summit. Bush urged African leaders to avoid discriminatory laws that make the treatment of HIV/AIDS more difficult.[417]
+Bush has spoken in favor of increased global participation of women in politics and societal matters in foreign countries.[418][419]
+On November 2, 2014, Bush spoke at an event to 200 business and civic leaders at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum to raise awareness for the upcoming Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.[33][420]
+Bush published a biography of his father, George Bush, called 41: A Portrait of My Father. It was released on November 11, 2014.[421]
+In an interview published by Israel Hayom magazine on June 12, 2015, Bush said "boots on the ground" would be needed in order to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). He added that people had said during his presidency that he should withdraw American troops from Iraq, but he chose the opposite, sending 30,000 more troops in order to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that they indeed were defeated. Bush was also asked about Iran but declined to answer, stating that any answer he gives would be interpreted as undermining Obama.[422]
+In February 2016, George W. Bush spoke and campaigned for his brother Jeb Bush in South Carolina during a rally for the Jeb Bush presidential campaign in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries.[423]
+While Bush endorsed the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he declined to endorse the 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump[424] and he did not attend the 2016 Republican National Convention, which formally nominated Trump.[425] On the eve of Trump's nomination, it was reported that Bush had privately expressed concern about the current direction of the Republican Party and told a group of his former aides and advisors, "I'm worried that I will be the last Republican president."[426][427] Bush and his wife Laura did not vote for Trump in the 2016 presidential election according to a spokesperson for the Bush family, instead choosing to leave their presidential ballots blank.[428] After the election, Bush, his father, and his brother Jeb called Trump on the phone to congratulate him on his victory.[429] Both he and Laura attended Trump's inauguration, and images of Bush struggling to put on a rain poncho during the ceremony became an internet meme.[430] While leaving the event, Bush allegedly described the ceremony as "some weird shit".[431]
+In February 2017, Bush released a book of his own portraits of veterans called Portraits of Courage (full title: Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief's Tribute to America's Warriors).[432]
+Following the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bush and his father released a joint statement condemning the violence and ideologies present at the rally; "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms. As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country."[433] Their statement came as President Trump was facing controversy over his statements about the rally. Subsequently, Bush gave a speech in New York where he noted of the current political climate, "Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication." He continued, "Bigotry in any form is blasphemy against the American creed and it means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation," while urging citizens to oppose threats to American democracy and be positive role models for young people.[434] The speech was widely interpreted as a denouncement of Donald Trump and his ideologies, despite Bush not mentioning Trump by name.[434][435][436][437]
+In April 2018, Bush and his father met in Texas with Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.[438]
+In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's passing, George Bush visited South Korea to pay respects to Roh and gave a short eulogy.[439]
+On June 1, 2020 Bush released a statement addressing the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide reaction and protests following Floyd's death.[440][441] In the statement Bush wrote that he and former first lady Laura Bush "are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country".[442] He also elaborated on the racial injustices perpetrated by the police saying, that "it is time for America to examine our tragic failures", adding "Many doubt the justice of our country, and with good reason. Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions".[443]
+In January 2010, at President Obama's request, Bush and Bill Clinton established the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to raise contributions for relief and recovery efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake earlier that month.[444]
+On May 2, 2011, President Obama called Bush, who was at a restaurant with his wife, to inform him that Osama bin Laden had been killed.[445] The Bushes joined the Obamas in New York City to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At the Ground Zero memorial, Bush read a letter that President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a widow who had lost five sons during the Civil War.[446]
+On September 7, 2017, Bush partnered with former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama to work with One America Appeal to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in the Gulf Coast and Texas communities.[447]
+Over the years, President Bush has had a good-natured friendship with Michelle Obama. "President Bush and I, we are forever seatmates because of protocol, and that's how we sit at all the official functions," Mrs. Obama told the Today Show. "He's my partner in crime at every major thing where all the 'formers' gather. So we're together all the time." She later added, "I love him to death. He's a wonderful man, he's a funny man."[448] Bush and Obama have sat next to each other at many events including the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Selma (2015), the interfaith memorial service for the victims in Dallas (2016), the opening at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), and at the funerals for Nancy Reagan (2016), and John McCain (2018). Bush famously passed mints to Mrs. Obama during the McCain funeral in September 2018 and gave them to her again during the funeral of his father in December 2018.[449]
+After serving as president, Bush began painting as a hobby after reading Winston Churchill's essay "Painting as a Pastime." Subjects have included people, dogs, and still life.[450] He has also painted self-portraits and portraits of world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair.[451][452][453] In February 2017, Bush released a book of portraits of veterans, Portraits of Courage.[432] The net proceeds from his book are donated to the George W. Bush Presidential Center. In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's passing, George Bush drew a portrait of Roh to give to his family.[454]
+President Bush's legacy continues to develop today. Supporters credit Bush's counterterrorism policies with preventing another major terrorist attack from occurring in the U.S. after 9/11 and also praise individual policies such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. Critics often point to his handling of the Iraq War, specifically the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, that were the main rationale behind the initial invasion—as well as his handling of tax policy, Hurricane Katrina, climate change and the 2008 financial crisis—as proof that George W. Bush was unfit to be president.[458][459][460]
+Several historians and commentators hold that Bush was one of the most consequential presidents in American history. Princeton University scholar Julian Zelizer described Bush's presidency as a "transformative" one, and said that "some people hate him, some people love him, but I do think he'll have a much more substantive perception as time goes on".[461] Bryon Williams of The Huffington Post referred to Bush as "the most noteworthy president since FDR" and said the Patriot Act "increased authority of the executive branch at the expense of judicial opinions about when searches and seizures are reasonable" as evidence.[462] Bush's administration presided over the largest tax cuts since the presidency of Ronald Reagan,[463] and his homeland security reforms proved to be the most significant expansion of the federal government since the Great Society.[464] Much of these policies have endured in the administrations of his two immediate successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.[465][466]
+The George W. Bush presidency has been ranked among the worst in surveys of presidential scholars published in the late 2000s and 2010s.[467][468][469]
+A 2010 Siena Research Institute survey of the opinions of historians, political scientists, and presidential scholars ranked him 39th out of 43 presidents. The survey respondents gave President Bush low ratings on his handling of the U.S. economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments, and intelligence.[470] Bush said in 2013, "Ultimately history will judge the decisions I made, and I won't be around because it will take time for the objective historians to show up. So I am pretty comfortable with it. I did what I did."[471]
+Among the public, his reputation has improved somewhat since his presidency ended in 2009. In February 2012, Gallup reported that "Americans still rate George W. Bush among the worst presidents, though their views have become more positive in the three years since he left office."[472] Gallup had earlier noted that Bush's favorability ratings in public opinion surveys had begun to rise a year after he had left office, from 40 percent in January 2009 and 35 percent in March 2009, to 45 percent in July 2010, a period during which he had remained largely out of the news.[473] Other pollsters have noted similar trends of slight improvement  in Bush's personal favorability since the end of his presidency.[474] In April 2013, Bush's approval rating stood at 47 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval in a poll jointly conducted for The Washington Post and ABC, his highest approval rating since December 2005. Bush had achieved notable gains among seniors, non-college whites, and moderate and conservative Democrats since leaving office, although majorities disapproved of his handling of the economy (53 percent) and the Iraq War (57 percent).[475] His 47 percent approval rating was equal to that of President Obama's in the same polling period.[476] A CNN poll conducted that same month found that 55 percent of Americans said Bush's presidency had been a failure, with opinions divided along party lines, and 43 percent of independents calling it a success.[477] Bush's public image saw greater improvement starting in 2017, which has been interpreted as Democrats viewing him more favorably in response to Donald Trump's presidency,[478][479] an assessment that has also been expressed by Bush himself.[480]

en/2182.html.txt ADDED Viewed

The diff for this file is too large to render. See raw diff

en/2183.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,329 @@

+George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, he had previously served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. Born into the Bush family, his father, George H. W. Bush, served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993.
+Bush is the eldest son of Barbara and George H. W. Bush, and the second son to become the American president after his father, the first being John Quincy Adams. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, he worked in the oil industry. Bush married Laura Welch in 1977 and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. Bush was elected president of the United States in 2000 when he defeated Democratic incumbent Vice President Al Gore after a narrow and contested win that involved a Supreme Court decision to stop a recount in Florida. He became the fourth person to be elected president without a popular vote victory.
+In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush created the United States Department of Homeland Security and launched a "War on Terror" that began with the war in Afghanistan in 2001. He also launched the Iraq War in 2003, with the administration arguing that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, and that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States. Some administration officials falsely claimed that Hussein had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. No stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq. Signature legislation passed during his presidency included broad tax cuts, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Medicare Modernization Act, and funding for the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. In the 2004 presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in a close election. After his re-election, Bush received criticism from across the political spectrum[4][5] for his handling of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina,[6][7] and other challenges. Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post-World War II recession, often referred to as the "Great Recession", prompting the Bush administration to obtain congressional approval for multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system.
+Bush was among the most popular, as well as unpopular, U.S. presidents in history; he received the highest recorded approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but one of the lowest such ratings during the 2008 financial crisis.[8] Bush finished his second term in office in 2009 and returned to Texas. In 2010, he published his memoir, Decision Points.[9] His presidential library opened in 2013. His presidency has been rated as below-average in historical rankings of U.S. presidents, although his public favorability ratings have improved since leaving office.
+George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, at Yale–New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, while his father was a student at Yale.[10] He was the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce. He was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, with four siblings, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. Another younger sister, Robin, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953.[11] His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut.[12] His father was Ronald Reagan's vice president from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st U.S. president from 1989 to 1993. Bush has English and some German ancestry, along with more distant Dutch, Welsh, Irish, French, and Scottish roots.[13]
+Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the family moved to Houston after he had completed seventh grade. He then spent two years at The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Piney Point Village, Texas in the Houston area.[14]
+Bush attended high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he played baseball and was the head cheerleader during his senior year.[15][16] He attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.[17] During this time, he was a cheerleader and a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon, serving as the president of the fraternity during his senior year.[18][19][20] Bush became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior.[21] Bush was a rugby union player and was on Yale's 1st XV.[22] He characterized himself as an average student.[23] His GPA during his first three years at Yale was 77, and he had a similar average under a nonnumeric rating system in his final year.[24]
+After his application to the University of Texas School of Law was rejected, Bush entered Harvard Business School in the fall of 1973. He graduated in 1975 with an MBA degree. He is the only U.S. president to have earned an MBA.[25]
+Bush was engaged to Cathryn Lee Wolfman in 1967, but the engagement did not last. Bush and Wolfman remained on good terms after the end of the relationship.[26] While Bush was at a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a schoolteacher and librarian. After a three-month courtship, she accepted his marriage proposal and they wed on November 5 of that year.[27] The couple settled in Midland, Texas. Bush left his family's Episcopal Church to join his wife's United Methodist Church.[28] On November 25, 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna.[27]
+Prior to getting married, Bush struggled with multiple episodes of alcohol abuse.[29] In one instance on September 4, 1976, he was pulled over near his family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for driving under the influence of alcohol. He was cited for DUI, fined $150 (equivalent to $674 in 2019), and got his Maine driver's license briefly suspended.[30]
+Bush said his wife has had a stabilizing effect on his life,[27] and he attributes her influence to his 1986 decision to give up alcohol.[31] While Governor of Texas, Bush said of his wife, "I saw an elegant, beautiful woman who turned out not only to be elegant and beautiful, but very smart and willing to put up with my rough edges, and I must confess has smoothed them off over time."[27]
+Bush has been an avid reader throughout his adult life, preferring biographies and histories.[32] He read 14 Lincoln biographies, and during the last three years of his presidency, read 186 books. During his presidency, Bush read the Bible daily,[33] though at the end of his second term he said on television that he is "not a literalist" about Bible interpretation.[34] Walt Harrington, a journalist, recalled seeing "books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria" in his home when Bush was a Texas oilman. Other activities include cigar smoking and golf.[35] After leaving the White House, Bush took up oil painting.[36]
+In May 1968, Bush was commissioned into the Texas Air National Guard.[37] After two years of training in active-duty service,[38] he was assigned to Houston, flying Convair F-102s with the 147th Reconnaissance Wing out of the Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base.[37][39] Critics, including former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have alleged that Bush was favorably treated due to his father's political standing as a member of the House of Representatives, citing his selection as a pilot despite his low pilot aptitude test scores and his irregular attendance.[37] In June 2005, the United States Department of Defense released all the records of Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, which remain in its official archives.[40]
+In late 1972 and early 1973, he drilled with the 187th Fighter Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard. He had moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to work on the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton M. Blount.[41][42] In 1972, Bush was suspended from flying for failure to take a scheduled physical exam.[43] He was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserve on November 21, 1974.[44]
+In 1977, Bush established Arbusto Energy, a small oil exploration company, although it did not begin operations until the following year.[45][46] He later changed the name to Bush Exploration. In 1984, his company merged with the larger Spectrum 7, and Bush became chairman.[47] The company was hurt by decreased oil prices, and it folded into HKN, Inc.,[47][48] with Bush becoming a member of HKN's board of directors.[47] Questions of possible insider trading involving HKN arose, but a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation concluded that the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.[47][49]
+In April 1989, Bush arranged for a group of investors to purchase a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers baseball franchise for $89 million and invested $500,000 himself to start. He then served as managing general partner for five years.[50] He actively led the team's projects and regularly attended its games, often choosing to sit in the open stands with fans.[51] Bush's sale of his shares in the Rangers in 1998 brought him over $15 million from his initial $800,000 investment.[52]
+In 1978, Bush ran for the House of Representatives from Texas's 19th congressional district. The retiring member, George H. Mahon, had held the district for the Democratic Party since 1935. Bush's opponent, Kent Hance, portrayed him as out of touch with rural Texans, and Bush lost the election with 46.8 percent of the vote to Hance's 53.2 percent.[53]
+Bush and his family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1988 to work on his father's campaign for the U.S. presidency.[54][55] He served as a campaign advisor and liaison to the media, and assisted his father by campaigning across the country.[47] In December 1991, Bush was one of seven people named by his father to run his father's 1992 presidential re-election campaign, as a "campaign advisor".[56] The previous month, his father had asked him to tell White House chief of staff John H. Sununu he should resign.[57]
+Bush declared his candidacy for the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election at the same time his brother Jeb sought the governorship of Florida. His campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction, and education improvement.[47] Bush's campaign advisers were Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh, and Karl Rove.[58]
+After easily winning the Republican primary, Bush faced popular Democratic incumbent Governor Ann Richards.[47][59] In the course of the campaign, Bush pledged to sign a bill allowing Texans to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons. Richards had vetoed the bill, but Bush signed it into law after he became governor.[60] According to The Atlantic Monthly, the race "featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record – when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for 'appointing avowed homosexual activists' to state jobs".[61] The Atlantic, and others, connected the lesbian rumor to Karl Rove,[62] but Rove denied being involved.[63] Bush won the general election with 53.5 percent against Richards' 45.9 percent.[64]
+Bush used a budget surplus to push through Texas's largest tax-cut, $2 billion.[58] He extended government funding for organizations providing education of the dangers of alcohol and drug use and abuse, and helping to reduce domestic violence.[65] Critics contended that during his tenure, Texas ranked near the bottom in environmental evaluations. Supporters pointed to his efforts to raise the salaries of teachers and improve educational test scores.[47]
+In 1999, Bush signed a law that required electric retailers to buy a certain amount of energy from renewable sources (RPS),[66][67][68] which helped Texas eventually become the leading producer of wind powered electricity in the U.S.[69][70][71]
+In 1998, Bush won re-election with a record[47] 69 percent of the vote.[72] He became the first governor in Texas history to be elected to two consecutive four-year terms.[47] For most of Texas history, governors served two-year terms; a constitutional amendment extended those terms to four years starting in 1975.[73] In his second term, Bush promoted faith-based organizations and enjoyed high approval ratings.[47] He proclaimed June 10, 2000, to be Jesus Day in Texas, a day on which he urged all Texans to "answer the call to serve those in need".[74]
+Throughout Bush's first term, he was the focus of national attention as a potential future presidential candidate. Following his re-election, speculation soared, and within a year he decided to seek the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.[47]
+Incumbent Democratic president Bill Clinton was in his second and final term, and the field for nomination in both parties was wide open. Bush was the Governor of Texas in June 1999 when he announced his candidacy for president, joining John McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Orrin Hatch, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, John Kasich, and Bob Smith.
+Bush portrayed himself as a compassionate conservative, implying he was more centrist than other Republicans. He campaigned on a platform that included bringing integrity and honor back to the White House, increasing the size of the United States Armed Forces, cutting taxes, improving education, and aiding minorities.[47] By early 2000, the race had centered on Bush and McCain.[47]
+Bush won the Iowa caucuses, and although he was heavily favored to win the New Hampshire primary, he trailed McCain by 19 percent and lost that primary. Despite this, Bush regained momentum, and according to political observers, he effectively became the front runner after the South Carolina primary, which—according to The Boston Globe—made history for his campaign's negativity. The New York Times described it as a smear campaign.[75][76][77]
+On July 25, 2000, Bush surprised some observers when he selected Dick Cheney—a former White House Chief of Staff, U.S. Representative, and Secretary of Defense—to be his running mate. At the time, Cheney was serving as head of Bush's vice presidential search committee. Soon after at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Bush and Cheney were officially nominated by the Republican Party.
+Bush continued to campaign across the country and touted his record as Governor of Texas.[47] During his campaign, Bush criticized his Democratic opponent, incumbent Vice President Al Gore, over gun control and taxation.[78]
+When the election returns were tallied on November 7, Bush had won 29 states, including Florida. The closeness of the Florida outcome led to a recount.[47] The initial recount also went to Bush, but the outcome was tied up in lower courts for a month until eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.[79] On December 9, in the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling,[80] the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court decision that had ordered a third count, and stopped an ordered statewide hand recount based on the argument that the use of different standards among Florida's counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[47] The machine recount showed that Bush had won the Florida vote by a margin of 537 votes out of six million casts.[81] Although he had received 543,895 fewer individual nationwide votes than Gore, Bush won the election, receiving 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 (Gore had actually been awarded a total of 267 votes by the states pledged to him plus the District of Columbia, but one D.C. elector abstained). Bush was the first person to win an American presidential election with fewer popular votes than another candidate since Benjamin Harrison in 1888.[81]
+In his 2004 bid for re-election, Bush commanded broad support in the Republican Party and did not encounter a primary challenge. He appointed Ken Mehlman as campaign manager, and Karl Rove devised a political strategy.[82] Bush and the Republican platform emphasized a strong commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,[83] support for the USA PATRIOT Act,[84] a renewed shift in policy for constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-sex marriage,[83][85] reforming Social Security to create private investment accounts,[83] creation of an ownership society,[83] and opposing mandatory carbon emissions controls.[86] Bush also called for the implementation of a guest worker program for immigrants,[83] which was criticized by conservatives.[87]
+The Bush campaign advertised across the U.S. against Democratic candidates, including Bush's emerging opponent, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry and other Democrats attacked Bush on the Iraq War, and accused him of failing to stimulate the economy and job growth. The Bush campaign portrayed Kerry as a staunch liberal who would raise taxes and increase the size of government. The Bush campaign continuously criticized Kerry's seemingly contradictory statements on the war in Iraq,[47] and argued that Kerry lacked the decisiveness and vision necessary for success in the War on Terror.
+Following the resignation of CIA director George Tenet in 2004, Bush nominated Porter Goss to head the agency. The White House ordered Goss to purge agency officers who were disloyal to the administration.[88] After Goss' appointment, many of the CIA's senior agents were fired or quit. The CIA has been accused of deliberately leaking classified information to undermine the 2004 election.[89]
+In the election, Bush carried 31 of 50 states, receiving a total of 286 electoral votes. He won an absolute majority of the popular vote (50.7 percent to his opponent's 48.3 percent).[90] Bush's father George H.W. Bush was the previous president who won an absolute majority of the popular vote; he accomplished that feat in the 1988 election. Additionally, it was the first time since Herbert Hoover's election in 1928 that a Republican president was elected alongside re-elected Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress.
+Bush had originally outlined an ambitious domestic agenda, but his priorities were significantly altered following the September 11 attacks.[91] Wars were waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there were significant domestic debates regarding immigration, healthcare, Social Security, economic policy, and treatment of terrorist detainees. Over an eight-year period, Bush's once-high approval ratings[92] steadily declined, while his disapproval numbers increased significantly.[93] In 2007, the United States entered the longest post-World War II recession.[94]
+Bush took office during a period of economic recession in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble.[95] The terrorist attacks also impacted the economy.
+His administration increased federal government spending from $1.789 trillion to $2.983 trillion (60 percent), while revenues increased from $2.025 trillion to $2.524 trillion (from 2000 to 2008). Individual income tax revenues increased by 14 percent, corporate tax revenues by 50 percent, and customs and duties by 40 percent. Discretionary defense spending was increased by 107 percent, discretionary domestic spending by 62 percent, Medicare spending by 131 percent, social security by 51 percent, and income security spending by 130 percent. Cyclically adjusted, revenues rose by 35 percent and spending by 65 percent.[96] The increase in spending was more than under any predecessor since Lyndon B. Johnson.[97] The number of economic regulation governmental workers increased by 91,196.[98]
+The surplus in fiscal year 2000 was $237 billion—the third consecutive surplus and the largest surplus ever.[99] In 2001, Bush's budget estimated that there would be a $5.6 trillion surplus over the next ten years.[100] Facing congressional opposition, Bush held townhall style meetings across the U.S. in order to increase public support for his plan for a $1.35 trillion tax cut program—one of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history.[47] Bush argued that unspent government funds should be returned to taxpayers, saying "the surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money."[47] Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warned of a recession and Bush stated that a tax cut would stimulate the economy and create jobs.[101] Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, opposed some of the tax cuts on the basis that they would contribute to budget deficits and undermine Social Security.[102] O'Neill disputes the claim, made in Bush's book Decision Points, that he never openly disagreed with him on planned tax cuts.[103] By 2003, the economy showed signs of improvement, though job growth remained stagnant.[47] Another tax cut was passed that year.
+Between 2001 and 2008, GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.125 percent,[104] less than for past business cycles.[105] Bush entered office with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 10,587, and the average peaked in October 2007 at over 14,000. When Bush left office, the average was at 7,949, one of the lowest levels of his presidency.[106] Only four other U.S. presidents have left office with the stock market lower than when they began.[107]
+Unemployment originally rose from 4.2 percent in January 2001 to 6.3 percent in June 2003, but subsequently dropped to 4.5 percent in July 2007.[108] Adjusted for inflation, median household income dropped by $1,175 between 2000 and 2007,[109] while Professor Ken Homa of Georgetown University has noted that "Median real after-tax household income went up two percent".[110] The poverty rate increased from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.3 percent in 2006 after peaking at 12.7 percent in 2004.[111] By October 2008, due to increases in spending,[112]:273 the national debt had risen to $11.3 trillion,[113] an increase of over 100 percent from 2000 when the debt was only $5.6 trillion.[114][115] Most debt was accumulated as a result of what became known as the "Bush tax cuts" and increased national security spending.[116] In March 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama said when he voted against raising the debt ceiling: "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure."[117] By the end of Bush's presidency, unemployment climbed to 7.2 percent.[118]
+In December 2007, the United States entered the longest post–World War II recession,[94] caused by a housing market correction, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, and a declining dollar value.[119] In February 2008, 63,000 jobs were lost, a five-year record,[120] and in November, over 500,000 jobs were lost, which marked the largest loss of jobs in the United States in 34 years.[121] The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the last four months of 2008, 1.9 million jobs were lost.[122] By the end of 2008, the U.S. had lost a total of 2.6 million jobs.[123]
+To aid with the situation, Bush signed a $170 billion economic stimulus package which was intended to improve the economic situation by sending tax rebate checks to many Americans and providing tax breaks for struggling businesses. The Bush administration pushed for significantly increased regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003,[124] and after two years, the regulations passed the House but died in the Senate. Many Republican senators, as well as influential members of the Bush Administration, feared that the agency created by these regulations would merely be mimicking the private sector's risky practices.[125][126][127] In September 2008, the crisis became much more serious beginning with the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a federal bailout of American International Group for $85 billion.[128]
+Many economists and world governments determined that the situation had become the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.[129][130] Additional regulation over the housing market would have been beneficial, according to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.[131] Bush, meanwhile, proposed a financial rescue plan to buy back a large portion of the U.S. mortgage market.[132] Vince Reinhardt, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, said "it would have helped for the Bush administration to empower the folks at Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC to look at these issues more closely", and additionally, that it would have helped "for Congress to have held hearings".[126]
+Bush undertook a number of educational agendas, such as increasing the funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in his first years of office and creating education programs to strengthen the grounding in science and mathematics for American high school students. Funding for the NIH was cut in 2006, the first such cut in 36 years, due to rising inflation.[133]
+One of the administration's early major initiatives was the No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to measure and close the gap between rich and poor student performance, provide options to parents with students in low-performing schools, and target more federal funding to low-income schools. This landmark education initiative passed with broad bipartisan support, including that of Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.[134] It was signed into law by Bush in early 2002.[135] Many contend that the initiative has been successful, as cited by the fact that students in the U.S. have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since Bush signed "No Child Left Behind" into law.[136] Critics argue that it is underfunded[137] and that NCLBA's focus on "high-stakes testing" and quantitative outcomes is counterproductive.[138]
+In 2005, he announced a National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza to prepare the United States for a flu pandemic, which culminated in an implementation plan published by the Homeland Security Council in 2006.[139][140]
+After being re-elected, Bush signed into law a Medicare drug benefit program that, according to Jan Crawford, resulted in "the greatest expansion in America's welfare state in forty years" – the bill's costs approached $7 trillion.[112]:274 In 2007, Bush opposed and vetoed State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation, which was added by the Democrats onto a war funding bill and passed by Congress. The SCHIP legislation would have significantly expanded federally funded health care benefits and plans to children of some low-income families from about six million to ten million children. It was to be funded by an increase in the cigarette tax.[141] Bush viewed the legislation as a move toward socialized health care, and asserted that the program could benefit families making as much as $83,000 per year who did not need the help.[142]
+On May 21, 2008, Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).[143][144] The bill aimed to protect Americans against health insurance and employment discrimination based on a person's genetic information. The issue had been debated for 13 years before it finally became law. The measure is designed to protect citizens without hindering genetic research.
+Following Republican efforts to pass the Medicare Act of 2003, Bush signed the bill, which included major changes to the Medicare program by providing beneficiaries with some assistance in paying for prescription drugs, while relying on private insurance for the delivery of benefits.[145] The retired persons lobby group AARP worked with the Bush Administration on the program and gave their endorsement. Bush said the law, estimated to cost $400 billion over the first ten years, would give the elderly "better choices and more control over their health care".[146]
+Bush began his second term by outlining a major initiative to "reform" Social Security,[147] which was facing record deficit projections beginning in 2005. Bush made it the centerpiece of his domestic agenda despite opposition from some in the U.S. Congress.[147] In his 2005 State of the Union Address, Bush discussed the potential impending bankruptcy of the program and outlined his new program, which included partial privatization of the system, personal Social Security accounts, and options to permit Americans to divert a portion of their Social Security tax (FICA) into secured investments.[147] Democrats opposed the proposal to partially privatize the system.[147]
+Bush embarked on a 60-day national tour, campaigning for his initiative in media events known as "Conversations on Social Security" in an attempt to gain public support.[148] Nevertheless, public support for the proposal declined,[149] and the House Republican leadership decided not to put Social Security reform on the priority list for the remainder of their 2005 legislative agenda.[150] The proposal's legislative prospects were further diminished by autumn 2005 due to political fallout from the response to Hurricane Katrina.[151] After the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, there was no prospect of further congressional action on the Bush proposal for the remainder of his term in office.
+Upon taking office in 2001, Bush stated his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which seeks to impose mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, citing that the treaty exempted 80 percent of the world's population[152] and would have cost tens of billions of dollars per year.[153] He also cited that the Senate had voted 95–0 in 1997 on a resolution expressing its disapproval of the protocol.
+In May 2001, Bush signed an executive order to create an interagency task force to streamline energy projects,[154] and later signed two other executive orders to tackle environmental issues.[155]
+In 2002, Bush announced the Clear Skies Act of 2003,[156] which aimed at amending the Clean Air Act to reduce air pollution through the use of emissions trading programs. Many experts argued that this legislation would have weakened the original legislation by allowing higher emission rates of pollutants than were previously legal.[157] The initiative was introduced to Congress, but failed to make it out of committee.
+Later in 2006, Bush declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, creating the largest marine reserve to date. The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument comprises 84 million acres (340,000 km2) and is home to 7,000 species of fish, birds, and other marine animals, many of which are specific to only those islands.[158] The move was hailed by conservationists for "its foresight and leadership in protecting this incredible area".[159]
+Bush has said he believes that global warming is real[160] and has noted that it is a serious problem, but he asserted there is a "debate over whether it's man-made or naturally caused".[161] The Bush Administration's stance on global warming remained controversial in the scientific and environmental communities. Critics have alleged that the administration[162] misinformed the public and did not do enough to reduce carbon emissions and deter global warming.[163]
+In his 2006 State of the Union Address, Bush declared, "America is addicted to oil" and announced his Advanced Energy Initiative to increase energy development research.[164]
+In his 2007 State of the Union Address, Bush renewed his pledge to work toward diminished reliance on foreign oil by reducing fossil fuel consumption and increasing alternative fuel production.[165] Amid high gasoline prices in 2008, Bush lifted a ban on offshore drilling.[166] However, the move was largely symbolic because there was still a federal law banning offshore drilling. Bush said, "This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil reserves is action from the U.S. Congress."[166] Bush had said in June 2008, "In the long run, the solution is to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative energy technologies. My administration has worked with Congress to invest in gas-saving technologies like advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cells ... In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production."[167]
+In his 2008 State of the Union Address, Bush announced that the U.S. would commit $2 billion over the next three years to a new international fund to promote clean energy technologies and fight climate change, saying, "Along with contributions from other countries, this fund will increase and accelerate the deployment of all forms of cleaner, more efficient technologies in developing nations like India and China, and help leverage substantial private-sector capital by making clean energy projects more financially attractive." He also announced plans to reaffirm the United States' commitment to work with major economies, and, through the UN, to complete an international agreement that will slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases; he stated, "This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride."[168]
+Federal funding for medical research involving the creation or destruction of human embryos through the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health has been forbidden by law since the passage of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment in 1995.[169] Bush has said he supports adult stem cell research and has supported federal legislation that finances adult stem cell research. However, Bush did not support embryonic stem cell research.[170] On August 9, 2001, Bush signed an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for the 71 existing "lines" of stem cells,[171] but the ability of these existing lines to provide an adequate medium for testing has been questioned. Testing can be done on only 12 of the original lines, and all approved lines have been cultured in contact with mouse cells, which creates safety issues that complicate development and approval of therapies from these lines.[172] On July 19, 2006, Bush used his veto power for the first time in his presidency to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. The bill would have repealed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, thereby permitting federal money to be used for research where stem cells are derived from the destruction of an embryo.[173]
+Nearly 8 million immigrants came to the United States from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation's history.[174] Almost half entered illegally.[175] In 2006, Bush urged Congress to allow more than 12 million illegal immigrants to work in the United States with the creation of a "temporary guest-worker program". Bush also urged Congress to provide additional funds for border security and committed to deploying 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexico–United States border.[176] From May to June 2007, Bush strongly supported the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which was written by a bipartisan group of Senators with the active participation of the Bush administration.[177] The bill envisioned a legalization program for illegal immigrants, with an eventual path to citizenship; establishing a guest worker program; a series of border and work site enforcement measures; a reform of the green card application process and the introduction of a point-based "merit" system for green cards; elimination of "chain migration" and of the Diversity Immigrant Visa; and other measures. Bush argued that the lack of legal status denies the protections of U.S. laws to millions of people who face dangers of poverty and exploitation, and penalizes employers despite a demand for immigrant labor.[178] Bush contended that the proposed bill did not amount to amnesty.[179]
+A heated public debate followed, which resulted in a substantial rift within the Republican Party, most conservatives opposed it because of its legalization or amnesty provisions.[180] The bill was eventually defeated in the Senate on June 28, 2007, when a cloture motion failed on a 46–53 vote.[181] Bush expressed disappointment upon the defeat of one of his signature domestic initiatives.[182] The Bush administration later proposed a series of immigration enforcement measures that do not require a change in law.[183]
+On September 19, 2010, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Bush offered to accept 100,000 Palestinian refugees as American citizens if a permanent settlement had been reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.[184]
+Hurricane Katrina struck early in Bush's second term and was one of the most damaging natural disasters in U.S. history. Katrina formed in late August during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and devastated much of the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States, particularly New Orleans.[185]
+Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 27[186] and in Mississippi and Alabama the following day.[187] He authorized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to manage the disaster, but his announcement failed to spur these agencies to action.[188] The eye of the hurricane made landfall on August 29, and New Orleans began to flood due to levee breaches; later that day, Bush declared a major disaster in Louisiana,[189] officially authorizing FEMA to start using federal funds to assist in the recovery effort.
+On August 30, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declared it "an incident of national significance",[190] triggering the first use of the newly created National Response Plan. Three days later, on September 2, National Guard troops first entered the city of New Orleans.[191] The same day, Bush toured parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and declared that the success of the recovery effort up to that point was "not enough".[192]
+As the disaster in New Orleans intensified, critics charged that Bush was misrepresenting his administration's role in what they saw as a flawed response. Leaders attacked Bush for having appointed apparently incompetent leaders to positions of power at FEMA, notably Michael D. Brown;[193] it was also argued that the federal response was limited as a result of the Iraq War[194] and Bush himself did not act upon warnings of floods.[195][196] Bush responded to mounting criticism by accepting full responsibility for the federal government's failures in its handling of the emergency.[191] It has been argued that with Katrina, Bush passed a political tipping point from which he would not recover.[197]
+During Bush's second term, a controversy arose over the Justice Department's midterm dismissal of seven United States Attorneys.[198] The White House maintained that the U.S. attorneys were fired for poor performance.[199] Attorney General Alberto Gonzales later resigned over the issue, along with other senior members of the Justice Department.[200][201] The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas for advisers Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten to testify regarding this matter, but Bush directed Miers and Bolten to not comply with those subpoenas, invoking his right of executive privilege. Bush maintained that all his advisers were protected under a broad executive privilege protection to receive candid advice. The Justice Department determined that the President's order was legal.[202]
+Although Congressional investigations focused on whether the Justice Department and the White House were using the U.S. Attorney positions for political advantage, no official findings have been released. On March 10, 2008, the Congress filed a federal lawsuit to enforce their issued subpoenas.[203] On July 31, 2008, a United States district court judge ruled that Bush's top advisers were not immune from Congressional subpoenas.[204]
+In all, twelve Justice Department officials resigned rather than testify under oath before Congress. They included Attorney General Alberto Gonzales[205] and his chief of staff Kyle Sampson,[206] Gonzales' liaison to the White House Monica Goodling,[207] aide to the president Karl Rove[208] and his senior aide Sara Taylor.[209] In addition, legal counsel to the president Harriet Miers[210] and deputy chief of staff to the president Joshua Bolten[211] were both found in contempt of Congress.[209]
+In 2010, the Justice Department investigator concluded that though political considerations did play a part in as many as four of the attorney firings,[212] the firings were "inappropriately political", but not criminal. According to the prosecutors, there was insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution for any criminal offense.[213]
+During his presidential campaign, Bush's foreign policy platform included support for stronger economic and political relationship with Latin America, especially Mexico, and a reduction of involvement in "nation-building" and other small-scale military engagements. The administration pursued a national missile defense.[214] Bush was an advocate of China's entry into the World Trade Organization.[215]
+After the September 11 attacks on New York, Bush launched the War on Terror, in which the United States military and a small international coalition invaded Afghanistan. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush referred to an "axis of evil" consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.[216] In 2003, Bush then launched the invasion of Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction, which he described as being part of the War on Terrorism.[217] Those invasions led to the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.[218]
+Bush began his second term with an emphasis on improving strained relations with European nations. He appointed long-time adviser Karen Hughes to oversee a global public relations campaign. Bush lauded the pro-democracy struggles in Georgia and Ukraine.[219]
+In March 2006, Bush reversed decades of U.S. policy when he visited the Republic of India in a trip focused particularly on areas of nuclear energy, counter-terrorism co-operation; and discussions that would eventually lead to the India–United States Civil Nuclear Agreement.[220][221] This was in stark contrast to the stance taken by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, whose approach and response to India after the 1998 nuclear tests has been characterized as "sanctions and hectoring".[222]
+Midway through Bush's second term, questions arose whether Bush was retreating from his freedom and democracy agenda, which was highlighted in policy changes toward some oil-rich former Soviet republics in central Asia.[223]
+In an address before both Houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush thanked the nations of the world for their support following the September 11 attacks. He specifically thanked UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for traveling to Washington to show "unity of purpose with America", and said "America has no truer friend than Great Britain."[224]
+The September 11 terrorist attacks were a major turning point in Bush's presidency. That evening, he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising a strong response to the attacks. He also emphasized the need for the nation to come together and comfort the families of the victims. Three days after the attacks, Bush visited Ground Zero and met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firefighters, police officers, and volunteers. To much applause, Bush addressed the gathering via a megaphone while standing in a heap of rubble: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."[225]
+In a September 20 speech, Bush condemned Osama bin Laden and his organization Al-Qaeda, and issued an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating, to "hand over the terrorists, or ... share in their fate".[226]
+After September 11, Bush announced a global War on Terror. The Afghan Taliban regime was not forthcoming with Osama bin Laden, so Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime.[227] In his January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address, he asserted that an "axis of evil" consisting of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq was "arming to threaten the peace of the world" and "pose[d] a grave and growing danger".[228] The Bush Administration asserted both a right and the intention to wage preemptive war, or preventive war.[229] This became the basis for the Bush Doctrine which weakened the unprecedented levels of international and domestic support for the United States which had followed the September 11 attacks.[230]
+Dissent and criticism of Bush's leadership in the War on Terror increased as the war in Iraq continued.[231][232][233] In 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq War had become the "cause célèbre for jihadists".[234][235]
+On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces initiated bombing campaigns that led to the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in Kabul on November 13. The main goals of the war were to defeat the Taliban, drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and capture key al-Qaeda leaders. In December 2001, the Pentagon reported that the Taliban had been defeated,[236] but cautioned that the war would go on to continue weakening Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.[236] Later that month the UN had installed the Afghan Transitional Administration chaired by Hamid Karzai.[237][238]
+Efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden failed as he escaped a battle in December 2001 in the mountainous region of Tora Bora, which the Bush Administration later acknowledged to have resulted from a failure to commit enough U.S. ground troops.[239] It was not until May 2011, two years after Bush left office, that bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces under the Obama administration. Bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains at large.
+Despite the initial success in driving the Taliban from power in Kabul, by early 2003 the Taliban was regrouping, amassing new funds and recruits.[240] The 2005 failure of Operation Red Wings showed that the Taliban had returned.[241] In 2006, the Taliban insurgency appeared larger, fiercer and better organized than expected, with large-scale allied offensives such as Operation Mountain Thrust attaining limited success.[242][243][244] As a result, Bush commissioned 3,500 additional troops to the country in March 2007.[245]
+Beginning with his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began publicly focusing attention on Iraq, which he labeled as part of an "axis of evil" allied with terrorists and posing "a grave and growing danger" to U.S. interests through possession of weapons of mass destruction.[228][246]
+In the latter half of 2002, CIA reports contained assertions of Saddam Hussein's intent of reconstituting nuclear weapons programs, not properly accounting for Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, and that some Iraqi missiles had a range greater than allowed by the UN sanctions.[247][248] Contentions that the Bush Administration manipulated or exaggerated the threat and evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities would eventually become a major point of criticism for the president.[249][250]
+In late 2002 and early 2003, Bush urged the United Nations to enforce Iraqi disarmament mandates, precipitating a diplomatic crisis. In November 2002, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei led UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, but were advised by the U.S. to depart the country four days prior to the U.S. invasion, despite their requests for more time to complete their tasks.[251] The U.S. initially sought a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of military force but dropped the bid for UN approval due to vigorous opposition from several countries.[252] The Bush administration's claim that the Iraq War was part of the War on Terror had been questioned and contested by political analysts.[253]
+More than 20 nations (most notably the United Kingdom), designated the "coalition of the willing" joined the United States[254] in invading Iraq. They launched the invasion on March 20, 2003. The Iraqi military was quickly defeated. The capital, Baghdad, fell on April 9, 2003. On May 1, Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The initial success of U.S. operations increased his popularity, but the U.S. and allied forces faced a growing insurgency led by sectarian groups; Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech was later criticized as premature.[255] From 2004 until 2007, the situation in Iraq deteriorated further, with some observers arguing that there was a full-scale civil war in Iraq.[256] Bush's policies met with criticism, including demands domestically to set a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq. The 2006 report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, concluded that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating". While Bush admitted there were strategic mistakes made in regards to the stability of Iraq,[257] he maintained he would not change the overall Iraq strategy.[258][259] According to Iraq Body Count, some 251,000 Iraqis have been killed in the civil war following the U.S.-led invasion, including at least 163,841 civilians.[260]
+In January 2005, free, democratic elections were held in Iraq for the first time in 50 years.[261] According to Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffak al-Rubaie, "This is the greatest day in the history of this country."[261] Bush praised the event as well, saying that the Iraqis "have taken rightful control of their country's destiny".[261] This led to the election of Jalal Talabani as president and Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister of Iraq. A referendum to approve a constitution in Iraq was held in October 2005, supported by most Shiites and many Kurds.[262]
+On January 10, 2007, Bush announced a surge of 21,500 more troops for Iraq, as well as a job program for Iraqis, more reconstruction proposals, and $1.2 billion (equivalent to $1.5 billion in 2019) for these programs.[263] On May 1, 2007, Bush used his second-ever veto to reject a bill setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops,[264] saying the debate over the conflict was "understandable" but insisting that a continued U.S. presence there was crucial.[265]
+In March 2008, Bush praised the Iraqi government's "bold decision" to launch the Battle of Basra against the Mahdi Army, calling it "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq".[266] He said he would carefully weigh recommendations from his commanding General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about how to proceed after the end of the military buildup in the summer of 2008. He also praised the Iraqis' legislative achievements, including a pension law, a revised de-Baathification law, a new budget, an amnesty law, and a provincial powers measure that, he said, set the stage for the Iraqi elections.[267] By July 2008, American troop deaths had reached their lowest number since the war began,[268] and due to increased stability in Iraq, Bush announced the withdrawal of additional American forces.[268] During his last visit in Iraq in December 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw both of his shoes to Bush amid official press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.[269] Al-Zaidi yelled the strikes on Bush as "farewell kiss" and "for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq."[270]
+In March 2010, Center for Public Integrity released a report that President Bush's administration had made more than 900 false pretenses in a two-year period about alleged threat of Iraq against the United States, as his rationale to engage war in Iraq.[271] Senior war crimes prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz has suggested that Bush should be tried in the International Criminal Court for '269 war crime charges' related to the Iraq War.[272][273]
+Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush issued an executive order that authorized the President's Surveillance Program. The new directive allowed the National Security Agency to monitor communications between suspected terrorists outside the U.S. and parties within the U.S. without obtaining a warrant, which previously had been required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[274] As of 2009[update], the other provisions of the program remained highly classified.[275] Once the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel questioned its original legal opinion that FISA did not apply in a time of war, the program was subsequently re-authorized by the President on the basis that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists.[276] The program proved to be controversial; critics of the administration and organizations such as the American Bar Association argued that it was illegal.[277] In August 2006, a U.S. district court judge ruled that the NSA electronic surveillance program was unconstitutional,[278] but on July 6, 2007, that ruling was vacated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing.[279] On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders that the program would not be reauthorized by the President, but would be subjected to judicial oversight.[280] Later in 2007, the NSA launched a replacement for the program, referred to as PRISM, which was subject to the oversight of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[281] This program was not publicly revealed until reports by The Washington Post[281] and The Guardian[282] emerged in June 2013.[281]
+Bush authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and several other "enhanced interrogation techniques" that several critics, including Barack Obama, would label as torture.[283][284][285][286] Between 2002 and 2003, the CIA considered certain enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to be legal based on secret Justice Department legal opinions arguing that terror detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture, which was described as "an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war".[287][288] The CIA had exercised the technique on certain key terrorist suspects under authority given to it in the Bybee Memo from the Attorney General, though that memo was later withdrawn.[289] While not permitted by the U.S. Army Field Manuals which assert "that harsh interrogation tactics elicit unreliable information",[287] the Bush administration believed these enhanced interrogations "provided critical information" to preserve American lives.[290] Critics, such as former CIA officer Bob Baer, have stated that information was suspect, "you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough."[291]
+On October 17, 2006, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law.[292] The new rule was enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006),[293] which allowed the U.S. government to prosecute unlawful enemy combatants by military commission rather than a standard trial. The law also denied the detainees access to habeas corpus and barred the torture of prisoners. The provision of the law allowed the president to determine what constitutes "torture".[292]
+On March 8, 2008, Bush vetoed H.R. 2082,[294] a bill that would have expanded congressional oversight over the intelligence community and banned the use of waterboarding as well as other forms of interrogation not permitted under the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, saying that "the bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the War on Terror".[295] In April 2009, the ACLU sued and won release of the secret memos that had authorized the Bush administration's interrogation tactics.[296] One memo detailed specific interrogation tactics including a footnote that described waterboarding as torture as well as that the form of waterboarding used by the CIA was far more intense than authorized by the Justice Department.[297]
+Bush publicly condemned Kim Jong-il of North Korea and identified North Korea as one of three states in an "axis of evil". He said that "the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."[228] Within months, "both countries had walked away from their respective commitments under the U.S.–DPRK Agreed Framework of October 1994."[298] North Korea's October 9, 2006, detonation of a nuclear device further complicated Bush's foreign policy, which centered for both terms of his presidency on "[preventing] the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world".[228] Bush condemned North Korea's position, reaffirmed his commitment to "a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula", and said that "transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States", for which North Korea would be held accountable.[299] On May 7, 2007, North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactors immediately pending the release of frozen funds held in a foreign bank account. This was a result of a series of three-way talks initiated by the United States and including China.[300] On September 2, 2007, North Korea agreed to disclose and dismantle all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007.[301] By May 2009, North Korea had restarted its nuclear program and threatened to attack South Korea.[302]
+On June 22, 2010, "While South Korea prospers, the people of North Korea have suffered profoundly," he said, adding that communism had resulted in dire poverty, mass starvation and brutal suppression. "In recent years," he went on to say, "the suffering has been compounded by the leader who wasted North Korea's precious few resources on personal luxuries and nuclear weapons programs."[303]
+Bush expanded economic sanctions on Syria.[304] In 2003, Bush signed the Syria Accountability Act, which expanded sanctions on Syria. In early 2007, the Treasury Department, acting on a June 2005 executive order, froze American bank accounts of Syria's Higher Institute of Applied Science and Technology, Electronics Institute, and National Standards and Calibration Laboratory. Bush's order prohibits Americans from doing business with these institutions suspected of helping spread weapons of mass destruction[305] and being supportive of terrorism.[306] Under separate executive orders signed by Bush in 2004 and later 2007, the Treasury Department froze the assets of two Lebanese and two Syrians, accusing them of activities to "undermine the legitimate political process in Lebanon" in November 2007. Those designated included: Assaad Halim Hardan, a member of Lebanon's parliament and current leader of the Syrian Socialist National Party; Wi'am Wahhab, a former member of Lebanon's government (Minister of the Environment) under Prime Minister Omar Karami (2004–2005); Hafiz Makhluf, a colonel and senior official in the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate and a cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and Muhammad Nasif Khayrbik, identified as a close adviser to Assad.[307]
+In the State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush outlined a five-year strategy for global emergency AIDS relief, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Bush announced $15 billion for this effort[308] which directly supported life-saving antiretroviral treatment for more than 3.2 million men, women and children worldwide.[309] The U.S. government had spent some $44 billion on the project since 2003 (a figure that includes $7 billion contributed to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a multilateral organization),[310] which saved an estimated five million lives.[311] According to The New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, "Bush did more to stop AIDS and more to help Africa than any president before or since."[311]
+On May 10, 2005, Vladimir Arutyunian, a native Georgian who was born to a family of ethnic Armenians, threw a live hand grenade toward a podium where Bush was speaking at Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was seated nearby. It landed in the crowd about 65 feet (20 m) from the podium after hitting a girl, but it did not detonate. Arutyunian was arrested in July 2005, confessed, was convicted and was given a life sentence in January 2006.[312]
+Bush withdrew U.S. support for several international agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia. He also signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia.
+Bush emphasized a careful approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; he denounced Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat for his support of violence, but sponsored dialogues between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush supported Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan, and lauded the democratic elections held in Palestine after Arafat's death.
+In July 2001, Bush visited Pope John Paul II at Castel Gandolfo.[313]
+Bush also expressed U.S. support for the defense of Taiwan following the stand-off in April 2001 with the People's Republic of China over the Hainan Island incident, when an EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided with a People's Liberation Army Air Force jet, leading to the detention of U.S. personnel. From 2003 to 2004, Bush authorized U.S. military intervention in Haiti and Liberia to protect U.S. interests. Bush condemned the militia attacks Darfur and denounced the killings in Sudan as genocide.[314] Bush said an international peacekeeping presence was critical in Darfur, but he opposed referring the situation to the International Criminal Court.
+On June 10, 2007, Bush met with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and became the first president to visit Albania.[315] Bush has voiced his support for the independence of Kosovo.[316] Bush opposed South Ossetia's independence.[317] On August 15, 2008, Bush said of Russia's invasion of the country of Georgia: "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."[318]
+Bush opened the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Departing from previous practice, he stood among a group of U.S. athletes rather than from a ceremonial stand or box, saying: "On behalf of a proud, determined, and grateful nation, I declare open the Games of Salt Lake City, celebrating the Olympic Winter Games."[319] In 2008, in the course of a good-will trip to Asia, he attended the Summer Olympics in Beijing.[320]
+Bush twice invoked Section 3 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows a president to temporarily transfer the powers and duties of his office to the vice president, who then becomes acting president. On June 29, 2002, Bush underwent a colonoscopy and chose to invoke Section 3 of the amendment, making Vice President Dick Cheney the acting president. The medical procedure began at 7:09 am. EDT and ended at 7:29 am. EDT. Bush woke up twenty minutes later, but did not resume his presidential powers and duties until 9:24 am. EDT after the president's doctor, Richard Tubb, conducted an overall examination. Tubb said he recommended the additional time to make sure the sedative had no after effects. On July 21, 2007, Bush again invoked Section 3 in response to having to undergo a colonoscopy, again making Vice President Cheney the acting president. Bush invoked Section 3 at 7:16 a.m. EDT. He reclaimed his powers at 9:21 a.m. EDT. In both cases, Bush specifically cited Section 3 when he transferred the presidential powers to the Vice President and when he reclaimed those powers.[321]
+Following the announcement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement on July 1, 2005, Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed her. On September 5, following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, this nomination was withdrawn and Bush instead nominated Roberts for Chief Justice to succeed Rehnquist. Roberts was confirmed by the Senate as the 17th Chief Justice on September 29, 2005.
+On October 3, 2005, Bush nominated long time White House Counsel Harriet Miers for O'Connor's position. After facing significant opposition from both parties, who found her to be ill-prepared and uninformed on the law,[112]:278 Miers asked that her name be withdrawn on October 27. Four days later, on October 31, Bush nominated federal appellate judge Samuel Alito. Alito was confirmed as the 110th Supreme Court Justice on January 31, 2006.[322]
+In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 61 judges to the United States courts of appeals and 261 judges to the United States district courts. Each of these numbers, along with his total of 324 judicial appointments, is third in American history, behind both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Bush experienced a number of judicial appointment controversies. Debate during one confirmation session lasted "39 stupefying hours" according to The New York Times. On August 3, 2001, the Senate did not consent to keep existing nominations in status quo, returning 40 judicial nominations, and 164 total nominations.[323][324][325]
+At the outset, Judicature magazine noted that the "Senate Democrats were gearing up for the approaching confirmation hearings" before the first set of nominees were sent to the Senate. It then cites The New York Times as saying "Senate Democrats have pledged they will not automatically vote to confirm Mr. Bush's judicial nominees and will subject them to intense scrutiny."[326]
+The Senate had confirmed only eight of Bush's 60 judicial nominations by October 2001. In February 2003, the Democrats successfully filibustered the nomination of Miguel Estrada.[327]
+Bush's upbringing in West Texas, his accent, his vacations on his Texas ranch, and his penchant for country metaphors contribute to his folksy, American cowboy image.[328][329] "I think people look at him and think John Wayne", said Piers Morgan, editor of the British Daily Mirror.[330]
+Bush has been parodied by the media,[331] comedians, and other politicians.[332] Detractors tended to cite linguistic errors made by Bush during his public speeches, which are colloquially referred to as Bushisms.[333]
+In contrast to his father—who was perceived as having troubles with an overarching unifying theme—Bush embraced larger visions and was seen as a man of larger ideas and associated huge risks.[334]
+Tony Blair wrote in 2010 that the caricature of Bush as being dumb is "ludicrous" and that Bush is "very smart".[335] In an interview with Playboy, The New York Times columnist David Brooks said Bush "was 60 IQ points smarter in private than he was in public. He doesn't want anybody to think he's smarter than they are, so puts on a Texas act."[336]
+Bush began his presidency with approval ratings near 50 percent.[337] After the September 11 attacks, Bush gained an approval rating of 90 percent,[338] maintaining 80 to 90 percent approval for four months after the attacks. It remained over 50 percent during most of his first term[8] and then fell to as low as 19 percent in his second term.[339]
+In 2000 and again in 2004, Time magazine named George W. Bush as its Person of the Year, a title awarded to someone who the editors believe "has done the most to influence the events of the year".[340] In May 2004, Gallup reported that 89 percent of the Republican electorate approved of Bush.[341] However, the support waned due mostly to a minority of Republicans' frustration with him on issues of spending, illegal immigration, and Middle Eastern affairs.[342]
+Within the United States armed forces, according to an unscientific survey, the president was strongly supported in the 2004 presidential elections.[343] While 73 percent of military personnel said they would vote for Bush, 18 percent preferred his Democratic rival, John Kerry.[343] According to Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who has studied the political leanings of the U.S. military, members of the armed services supported Bush because they found him more likely than Kerry to complete the War in Iraq.[343]
+Bush's approval rating went below the 50 percent mark in AP-Ipsos polling in December 2004.[344] Thereafter, his approval ratings and approval of his handling of domestic and foreign policy issues steadily dropped. After his re-election in 2004, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum[4][5][345] for his handling of the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina,[6][7][346] and to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance, the Plame affair, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp controversies.[347]
+Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Polls conducted in 2006 showed an average of 37 percent approval ratings for Bush,[348] the lowest for any second-term president at that point in his term since Harry S. Truman in March 1951 (when Truman's approval rating was 28 percent),[344][349] which contributed to what Bush called the "thumping" of the Republican Party in the 2006 mid-term elections.[350] Throughout most of 2007, Bush's approval rating hovered in the mid-thirties;[351] the average for his entire second term was 37 percent, according to Gallup.[352]
+By the beginning of 2008, his final year in office, Bush's approval rating had dropped to a low of just 19 percent, largely from the loss of support among Republicans.[339] Commenting on his low poll numbers and accusations of being "the worst president,"[353][354] Bush would say, "I make decisions on what I think is right for the United States based upon principles. I frankly don't give a damn about the polls."[355]
+There were calls for Bush's impeachment, though most polls showed a plurality of Americans would not support such an action.[356] The arguments offered for impeachment usually centered on the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy,[357] the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq, and alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions.[358] Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who had run against Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign, introduced 35 articles of impeachment on the floor of the House of Representatives against Bush on June 9, 2008, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared that impeachment was "off the table".[359]
+In April 2008, Bush's disapproval ratings reached the highest ever recorded for any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup poll, with 69 percent of those polled disapproving of the job Bush was doing as president and 28 percent approving—although the majority (66 percent) of Republicans still approved of his job performance.[360]
+In polls conducted in the fall, just before the 2008 election, his approval ratings remained at record lows of 19 to 20 percent,[361][362] while his disapproval ratings ranged from 67 percent to as high as 75 percent.[362][363] In polling conducted January 9–11, 2009, his final job approval rating by Gallup was 34 percent, which placed him on par with Jimmy Carter and Harry S. Truman, the other presidents whose final Gallup ratings measured in the low 30s (Richard Nixon's final Gallup approval rating was even lower, at 24 percent).[364] According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted January 11–15, 2009, Bush's final approval rating in office was 22 percent, the lowest in American history.[361]
+Bush was criticized internationally and targeted by the global anti-war and anti-globalization movements for his administration's foreign policy.[365][366] Views of him within the international community—even in France, a close ally of the United States—were more negative than those of most previous American presidents.[367]
+Bush was described as having especially close personal relationships with Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and Vicente Fox of Mexico, although formal relations were sometimes strained.[368][369][370] Other leaders, such as Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan,[371] Yoweri Museveni of Uganda,[372] José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain,[373] and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,[374] openly criticized the president. Later in Bush's presidency, tensions arose between him and Vladimir Putin, which led to a cooling of their relationship.[375]
+In 2006, most respondents in 18 of 21 countries surveyed around the world were found to hold an unfavorable opinion of Bush. Respondents indicated that they judged his administration as negative for world security.[376][377] In 2007, the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported that during the Bush presidency, attitudes towards the United States, and towards Americans, became less favorable around the world.[378] The Pew Research Center's 2007 Global Attitudes poll found that in only nine countries of 47 did most respondents express "a lot of confidence" or "some confidence" in Bush: Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Israel, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, and Uganda.[379] A March 2007 survey of Arab opinion conducted by Zogby International and the University of Maryland found that Bush was the most disliked leader in the Arab world.[380]
+During a June 2007 visit to the predominantly Muslim[381] Albania, Bush was greeted enthusiastically. Albania has a population of 2.8 million,[382] has troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country's government is highly supportive of American foreign policy.[383] A huge image of the President was hung in the middle of the capital city of Tirana flanked by Albanian and American flags while a local street was named after him.[384][385] A shirt-sleeved statue of Bush was unveiled in Fushë-Krujë, a few kilometers northwest of Tirana.[386] The Bush administration's support for the independence of Albanian-majority Kosovo, while endearing him to the Albanians, has troubled U.S. relations with Serbia, leading to the February 2008 torching of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade.[387]
+On May 7, 2005, during an official state visit to Latvia, Bush was awarded the Order of the Three Stars presented to him by President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga.[388] A few places outside the United States bear Bush's name. In 2005, the Tbilisi City Council voted to rename a street in honor of the U.S. president.[389] Previously known as Melaani Drive, the street links the Georgian capital's airport with the city center and was used by Bush's motorcade during his visit four months earlier.[390] A street in Tirana, formerly known as Rruga Punëtorët e Rilindjes, situated directly outside the Albanian Parliament, was renamed after Bush a few days before he made the first-ever visit by an American president to Albania in June 2007.[391] In Jerusalem, a small plaza with a monument bearing his name is also dedicated to Bush.[392]
+In 2012, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves awarded Bush the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana for his work in expanding NATO.[393]
+Two elementary schools are named after him: George W. Bush Elementary School of the Stockton Unified School District in Stockton, California,[394] and George W. Bush Elementary School of the Wylie Independent School District in St. Paul, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.[395]
+Following the inauguration of Barack Obama, Bush and his family flew from Andrews Air Force Base to a homecoming celebration in Midland, Texas, following which they returned to their ranch in Crawford, Texas.[396] They bought a home in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, where they settled down.[397]
+He makes regular appearances at various events throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area, most notably when he conducted the opening coin toss at the Dallas Cowboys first game in the team's new stadium in Arlington[398] and an April 2009 visit to a Texas Rangers game, where he thanked the people of Dallas for helping him settle in and was met with a standing ovation.[399] He also attended every home playoff game for the Texas Rangers 2010 season and, accompanied by his father, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington for Game 4 of the 2010 World Series on October 31, 2010.[400]
+On August 6, 2013, Bush was successfully treated for a coronary artery blockage with a stent. The blockage had been found during an annual medical examination.[401]
+In reaction to the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers, Bush stated: "Laura and I are heartbroken by the heinous acts of violence in our city last night. Murdering the innocent is always evil, never more so than when the lives taken belong to those who protect our families and communities."[402]
+Since leaving office, Bush has kept a relatively low profile[403] though he has made public appearances, most notably after the release of his memoirs in 2010 and for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2011. In March 2009, he delivered his first post-presidency speech in Calgary, Alberta,[404][405] appeared via video on The Colbert Report during which he praised U.S. troops for earning a "special place in American history,"[406] and attended the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy.[407] Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker on October 26 at the "Get Motivated" seminar in Dallas.[408] In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting on November 5, 2009, the Bushes paid an undisclosed visit to the survivors and the victims' families the day following the shooting, having contacted the base commander requesting that the visit be private and not involve press coverage.[409]
+Bush released his memoirs, Decision Points, on November 9, 2010. During a pre-release appearance promoting the book, Bush said he considered his biggest accomplishment to be keeping "the country safe amid a real danger", and his greatest failure to be his inability to secure the passage of Social Security reform.[410] He also made news defending his administration's enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "I'd do it again to save lives."[411]
+In 2012, he wrote the foreword of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, an economics book published by the George W. Bush Presidential Center.[412][413] He also presented the book at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas.[414]
+Bush appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on November 19, 2013, along with the former First Lady, Laura Bush. When asked by Leno why he does not comment publicly about the Obama administration, Bush said, "I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor."[415] Despite this statement, on April 25, 2015, Bush criticized President Obama at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Bush criticized Obama's handling of Iran, specifically with respect to sanctions and a nuclear deal, saying: "You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That's how Americans should view the deal." Bush also attacked Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, calling it a "strategic blunder", borrowing a term that had been used by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.[416]
+Alongside the 2014 United States–Africa Leaders Summit, Bush, Michelle Obama, the State Department, and the George W. Bush Institute hosted a daylong forum on education and health with the spouses of the African leaders attending the summit. Bush urged African leaders to avoid discriminatory laws that make the treatment of HIV/AIDS more difficult.[417]
+Bush has spoken in favor of increased global participation of women in politics and societal matters in foreign countries.[418][419]
+On November 2, 2014, Bush spoke at an event to 200 business and civic leaders at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum to raise awareness for the upcoming Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.[33][420]
+Bush published a biography of his father, George Bush, called 41: A Portrait of My Father. It was released on November 11, 2014.[421]
+In an interview published by Israel Hayom magazine on June 12, 2015, Bush said "boots on the ground" would be needed in order to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). He added that people had said during his presidency that he should withdraw American troops from Iraq, but he chose the opposite, sending 30,000 more troops in order to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that they indeed were defeated. Bush was also asked about Iran but declined to answer, stating that any answer he gives would be interpreted as undermining Obama.[422]
+In February 2016, George W. Bush spoke and campaigned for his brother Jeb Bush in South Carolina during a rally for the Jeb Bush presidential campaign in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries.[423]
+While Bush endorsed the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he declined to endorse the 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump[424] and he did not attend the 2016 Republican National Convention, which formally nominated Trump.[425] On the eve of Trump's nomination, it was reported that Bush had privately expressed concern about the current direction of the Republican Party and told a group of his former aides and advisors, "I'm worried that I will be the last Republican president."[426][427] Bush and his wife Laura did not vote for Trump in the 2016 presidential election according to a spokesperson for the Bush family, instead choosing to leave their presidential ballots blank.[428] After the election, Bush, his father, and his brother Jeb called Trump on the phone to congratulate him on his victory.[429] Both he and Laura attended Trump's inauguration, and images of Bush struggling to put on a rain poncho during the ceremony became an internet meme.[430] While leaving the event, Bush allegedly described the ceremony as "some weird shit".[431]
+In February 2017, Bush released a book of his own portraits of veterans called Portraits of Courage (full title: Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief's Tribute to America's Warriors).[432]
+Following the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bush and his father released a joint statement condemning the violence and ideologies present at the rally; "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms. As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country."[433] Their statement came as President Trump was facing controversy over his statements about the rally. Subsequently, Bush gave a speech in New York where he noted of the current political climate, "Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication." He continued, "Bigotry in any form is blasphemy against the American creed and it means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation," while urging citizens to oppose threats to American democracy and be positive role models for young people.[434] The speech was widely interpreted as a denouncement of Donald Trump and his ideologies, despite Bush not mentioning Trump by name.[434][435][436][437]
+In April 2018, Bush and his father met in Texas with Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.[438]
+In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's passing, George Bush visited South Korea to pay respects to Roh and gave a short eulogy.[439]
+On June 1, 2020 Bush released a statement addressing the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide reaction and protests following Floyd's death.[440][441] In the statement Bush wrote that he and former first lady Laura Bush "are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country".[442] He also elaborated on the racial injustices perpetrated by the police saying, that "it is time for America to examine our tragic failures", adding "Many doubt the justice of our country, and with good reason. Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions".[443]
+In January 2010, at President Obama's request, Bush and Bill Clinton established the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to raise contributions for relief and recovery efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake earlier that month.[444]
+On May 2, 2011, President Obama called Bush, who was at a restaurant with his wife, to inform him that Osama bin Laden had been killed.[445] The Bushes joined the Obamas in New York City to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At the Ground Zero memorial, Bush read a letter that President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a widow who had lost five sons during the Civil War.[446]
+On September 7, 2017, Bush partnered with former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama to work with One America Appeal to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in the Gulf Coast and Texas communities.[447]
+Over the years, President Bush has had a good-natured friendship with Michelle Obama. "President Bush and I, we are forever seatmates because of protocol, and that's how we sit at all the official functions," Mrs. Obama told the Today Show. "He's my partner in crime at every major thing where all the 'formers' gather. So we're together all the time." She later added, "I love him to death. He's a wonderful man, he's a funny man."[448] Bush and Obama have sat next to each other at many events including the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Selma (2015), the interfaith memorial service for the victims in Dallas (2016), the opening at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), and at the funerals for Nancy Reagan (2016), and John McCain (2018). Bush famously passed mints to Mrs. Obama during the McCain funeral in September 2018 and gave them to her again during the funeral of his father in December 2018.[449]
+After serving as president, Bush began painting as a hobby after reading Winston Churchill's essay "Painting as a Pastime." Subjects have included people, dogs, and still life.[450] He has also painted self-portraits and portraits of world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair.[451][452][453] In February 2017, Bush released a book of portraits of veterans, Portraits of Courage.[432] The net proceeds from his book are donated to the George W. Bush Presidential Center. In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's passing, George Bush drew a portrait of Roh to give to his family.[454]
+President Bush's legacy continues to develop today. Supporters credit Bush's counterterrorism policies with preventing another major terrorist attack from occurring in the U.S. after 9/11 and also praise individual policies such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. Critics often point to his handling of the Iraq War, specifically the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, that were the main rationale behind the initial invasion—as well as his handling of tax policy, Hurricane Katrina, climate change and the 2008 financial crisis—as proof that George W. Bush was unfit to be president.[458][459][460]
+Several historians and commentators hold that Bush was one of the most consequential presidents in American history. Princeton University scholar Julian Zelizer described Bush's presidency as a "transformative" one, and said that "some people hate him, some people love him, but I do think he'll have a much more substantive perception as time goes on".[461] Bryon Williams of The Huffington Post referred to Bush as "the most noteworthy president since FDR" and said the Patriot Act "increased authority of the executive branch at the expense of judicial opinions about when searches and seizures are reasonable" as evidence.[462] Bush's administration presided over the largest tax cuts since the presidency of Ronald Reagan,[463] and his homeland security reforms proved to be the most significant expansion of the federal government since the Great Society.[464] Much of these policies have endured in the administrations of his two immediate successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.[465][466]
+The George W. Bush presidency has been ranked among the worst in surveys of presidential scholars published in the late 2000s and 2010s.[467][468][469]
+A 2010 Siena Research Institute survey of the opinions of historians, political scientists, and presidential scholars ranked him 39th out of 43 presidents. The survey respondents gave President Bush low ratings on his handling of the U.S. economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments, and intelligence.[470] Bush said in 2013, "Ultimately history will judge the decisions I made, and I won't be around because it will take time for the objective historians to show up. So I am pretty comfortable with it. I did what I did."[471]
+Among the public, his reputation has improved somewhat since his presidency ended in 2009. In February 2012, Gallup reported that "Americans still rate George W. Bush among the worst presidents, though their views have become more positive in the three years since he left office."[472] Gallup had earlier noted that Bush's favorability ratings in public opinion surveys had begun to rise a year after he had left office, from 40 percent in January 2009 and 35 percent in March 2009, to 45 percent in July 2010, a period during which he had remained largely out of the news.[473] Other pollsters have noted similar trends of slight improvement  in Bush's personal favorability since the end of his presidency.[474] In April 2013, Bush's approval rating stood at 47 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval in a poll jointly conducted for The Washington Post and ABC, his highest approval rating since December 2005. Bush had achieved notable gains among seniors, non-college whites, and moderate and conservative Democrats since leaving office, although majorities disapproved of his handling of the economy (53 percent) and the Iraq War (57 percent).[475] His 47 percent approval rating was equal to that of President Obama's in the same polling period.[476] A CNN poll conducted that same month found that 55 percent of Americans said Bush's presidency had been a failure, with opinions divided along party lines, and 43 percent of independents calling it a success.[477] Bush's public image saw greater improvement starting in 2017, which has been interpreted as Democrats viewing him more favorably in response to Donald Trump's presidency,[478][479] an assessment that has also been expressed by Bush himself.[480]

en/2184.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,329 @@

+George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, he had previously served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. Born into the Bush family, his father, George H. W. Bush, served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993.
+Bush is the eldest son of Barbara and George H. W. Bush, and the second son to become the American president after his father, the first being John Quincy Adams. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, he worked in the oil industry. Bush married Laura Welch in 1977 and unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. Bush was elected president of the United States in 2000 when he defeated Democratic incumbent Vice President Al Gore after a narrow and contested win that involved a Supreme Court decision to stop a recount in Florida. He became the fourth person to be elected president without a popular vote victory.
+In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush created the United States Department of Homeland Security and launched a "War on Terror" that began with the war in Afghanistan in 2001. He also launched the Iraq War in 2003, with the administration arguing that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed an active weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, and that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States. Some administration officials falsely claimed that Hussein had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. No stockpiles of WMDs or an active WMD program were ever found in Iraq. Signature legislation passed during his presidency included broad tax cuts, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Medicare Modernization Act, and funding for the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. In the 2004 presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in a close election. After his re-election, Bush received criticism from across the political spectrum[4][5] for his handling of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina,[6][7] and other challenges. Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post-World War II recession, often referred to as the "Great Recession", prompting the Bush administration to obtain congressional approval for multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system.
+Bush was among the most popular, as well as unpopular, U.S. presidents in history; he received the highest recorded approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but one of the lowest such ratings during the 2008 financial crisis.[8] Bush finished his second term in office in 2009 and returned to Texas. In 2010, he published his memoir, Decision Points.[9] His presidential library opened in 2013. His presidency has been rated as below-average in historical rankings of U.S. presidents, although his public favorability ratings have improved since leaving office.
+George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, at Yale–New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, while his father was a student at Yale.[10] He was the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce. He was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, with four siblings, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. Another younger sister, Robin, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953.[11] His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut.[12] His father was Ronald Reagan's vice president from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st U.S. president from 1989 to 1993. Bush has English and some German ancestry, along with more distant Dutch, Welsh, Irish, French, and Scottish roots.[13]
+Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the family moved to Houston after he had completed seventh grade. He then spent two years at The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Piney Point Village, Texas in the Houston area.[14]
+Bush attended high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he played baseball and was the head cheerleader during his senior year.[15][16] He attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.[17] During this time, he was a cheerleader and a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon, serving as the president of the fraternity during his senior year.[18][19][20] Bush became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior.[21] Bush was a rugby union player and was on Yale's 1st XV.[22] He characterized himself as an average student.[23] His GPA during his first three years at Yale was 77, and he had a similar average under a nonnumeric rating system in his final year.[24]
+After his application to the University of Texas School of Law was rejected, Bush entered Harvard Business School in the fall of 1973. He graduated in 1975 with an MBA degree. He is the only U.S. president to have earned an MBA.[25]
+Bush was engaged to Cathryn Lee Wolfman in 1967, but the engagement did not last. Bush and Wolfman remained on good terms after the end of the relationship.[26] While Bush was at a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a schoolteacher and librarian. After a three-month courtship, she accepted his marriage proposal and they wed on November 5 of that year.[27] The couple settled in Midland, Texas. Bush left his family's Episcopal Church to join his wife's United Methodist Church.[28] On November 25, 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna.[27]
+Prior to getting married, Bush struggled with multiple episodes of alcohol abuse.[29] In one instance on September 4, 1976, he was pulled over near his family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for driving under the influence of alcohol. He was cited for DUI, fined $150 (equivalent to $674 in 2019), and got his Maine driver's license briefly suspended.[30]
+Bush said his wife has had a stabilizing effect on his life,[27] and he attributes her influence to his 1986 decision to give up alcohol.[31] While Governor of Texas, Bush said of his wife, "I saw an elegant, beautiful woman who turned out not only to be elegant and beautiful, but very smart and willing to put up with my rough edges, and I must confess has smoothed them off over time."[27]
+Bush has been an avid reader throughout his adult life, preferring biographies and histories.[32] He read 14 Lincoln biographies, and during the last three years of his presidency, read 186 books. During his presidency, Bush read the Bible daily,[33] though at the end of his second term he said on television that he is "not a literalist" about Bible interpretation.[34] Walt Harrington, a journalist, recalled seeing "books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria" in his home when Bush was a Texas oilman. Other activities include cigar smoking and golf.[35] After leaving the White House, Bush took up oil painting.[36]
+In May 1968, Bush was commissioned into the Texas Air National Guard.[37] After two years of training in active-duty service,[38] he was assigned to Houston, flying Convair F-102s with the 147th Reconnaissance Wing out of the Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base.[37][39] Critics, including former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have alleged that Bush was favorably treated due to his father's political standing as a member of the House of Representatives, citing his selection as a pilot despite his low pilot aptitude test scores and his irregular attendance.[37] In June 2005, the United States Department of Defense released all the records of Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, which remain in its official archives.[40]
+In late 1972 and early 1973, he drilled with the 187th Fighter Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard. He had moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to work on the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton M. Blount.[41][42] In 1972, Bush was suspended from flying for failure to take a scheduled physical exam.[43] He was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserve on November 21, 1974.[44]
+In 1977, Bush established Arbusto Energy, a small oil exploration company, although it did not begin operations until the following year.[45][46] He later changed the name to Bush Exploration. In 1984, his company merged with the larger Spectrum 7, and Bush became chairman.[47] The company was hurt by decreased oil prices, and it folded into HKN, Inc.,[47][48] with Bush becoming a member of HKN's board of directors.[47] Questions of possible insider trading involving HKN arose, but a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation concluded that the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.[47][49]
+In April 1989, Bush arranged for a group of investors to purchase a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers baseball franchise for $89 million and invested $500,000 himself to start. He then served as managing general partner for five years.[50] He actively led the team's projects and regularly attended its games, often choosing to sit in the open stands with fans.[51] Bush's sale of his shares in the Rangers in 1998 brought him over $15 million from his initial $800,000 investment.[52]
+In 1978, Bush ran for the House of Representatives from Texas's 19th congressional district. The retiring member, George H. Mahon, had held the district for the Democratic Party since 1935. Bush's opponent, Kent Hance, portrayed him as out of touch with rural Texans, and Bush lost the election with 46.8 percent of the vote to Hance's 53.2 percent.[53]
+Bush and his family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1988 to work on his father's campaign for the U.S. presidency.[54][55] He served as a campaign advisor and liaison to the media, and assisted his father by campaigning across the country.[47] In December 1991, Bush was one of seven people named by his father to run his father's 1992 presidential re-election campaign, as a "campaign advisor".[56] The previous month, his father had asked him to tell White House chief of staff John H. Sununu he should resign.[57]
+Bush declared his candidacy for the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election at the same time his brother Jeb sought the governorship of Florida. His campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction, and education improvement.[47] Bush's campaign advisers were Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh, and Karl Rove.[58]
+After easily winning the Republican primary, Bush faced popular Democratic incumbent Governor Ann Richards.[47][59] In the course of the campaign, Bush pledged to sign a bill allowing Texans to obtain permits to carry concealed weapons. Richards had vetoed the bill, but Bush signed it into law after he became governor.[60] According to The Atlantic Monthly, the race "featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record – when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for 'appointing avowed homosexual activists' to state jobs".[61] The Atlantic, and others, connected the lesbian rumor to Karl Rove,[62] but Rove denied being involved.[63] Bush won the general election with 53.5 percent against Richards' 45.9 percent.[64]
+Bush used a budget surplus to push through Texas's largest tax-cut, $2 billion.[58] He extended government funding for organizations providing education of the dangers of alcohol and drug use and abuse, and helping to reduce domestic violence.[65] Critics contended that during his tenure, Texas ranked near the bottom in environmental evaluations. Supporters pointed to his efforts to raise the salaries of teachers and improve educational test scores.[47]
+In 1999, Bush signed a law that required electric retailers to buy a certain amount of energy from renewable sources (RPS),[66][67][68] which helped Texas eventually become the leading producer of wind powered electricity in the U.S.[69][70][71]
+In 1998, Bush won re-election with a record[47] 69 percent of the vote.[72] He became the first governor in Texas history to be elected to two consecutive four-year terms.[47] For most of Texas history, governors served two-year terms; a constitutional amendment extended those terms to four years starting in 1975.[73] In his second term, Bush promoted faith-based organizations and enjoyed high approval ratings.[47] He proclaimed June 10, 2000, to be Jesus Day in Texas, a day on which he urged all Texans to "answer the call to serve those in need".[74]
+Throughout Bush's first term, he was the focus of national attention as a potential future presidential candidate. Following his re-election, speculation soared, and within a year he decided to seek the 2000 Republican presidential nomination.[47]
+Incumbent Democratic president Bill Clinton was in his second and final term, and the field for nomination in both parties was wide open. Bush was the Governor of Texas in June 1999 when he announced his candidacy for president, joining John McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Orrin Hatch, Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, John Kasich, and Bob Smith.
+Bush portrayed himself as a compassionate conservative, implying he was more centrist than other Republicans. He campaigned on a platform that included bringing integrity and honor back to the White House, increasing the size of the United States Armed Forces, cutting taxes, improving education, and aiding minorities.[47] By early 2000, the race had centered on Bush and McCain.[47]
+Bush won the Iowa caucuses, and although he was heavily favored to win the New Hampshire primary, he trailed McCain by 19 percent and lost that primary. Despite this, Bush regained momentum, and according to political observers, he effectively became the front runner after the South Carolina primary, which—according to The Boston Globe—made history for his campaign's negativity. The New York Times described it as a smear campaign.[75][76][77]
+On July 25, 2000, Bush surprised some observers when he selected Dick Cheney—a former White House Chief of Staff, U.S. Representative, and Secretary of Defense—to be his running mate. At the time, Cheney was serving as head of Bush's vice presidential search committee. Soon after at the 2000 Republican National Convention, Bush and Cheney were officially nominated by the Republican Party.
+Bush continued to campaign across the country and touted his record as Governor of Texas.[47] During his campaign, Bush criticized his Democratic opponent, incumbent Vice President Al Gore, over gun control and taxation.[78]
+When the election returns were tallied on November 7, Bush had won 29 states, including Florida. The closeness of the Florida outcome led to a recount.[47] The initial recount also went to Bush, but the outcome was tied up in lower courts for a month until eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.[79] On December 9, in the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling,[80] the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court decision that had ordered a third count, and stopped an ordered statewide hand recount based on the argument that the use of different standards among Florida's counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[47] The machine recount showed that Bush had won the Florida vote by a margin of 537 votes out of six million casts.[81] Although he had received 543,895 fewer individual nationwide votes than Gore, Bush won the election, receiving 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 (Gore had actually been awarded a total of 267 votes by the states pledged to him plus the District of Columbia, but one D.C. elector abstained). Bush was the first person to win an American presidential election with fewer popular votes than another candidate since Benjamin Harrison in 1888.[81]
+In his 2004 bid for re-election, Bush commanded broad support in the Republican Party and did not encounter a primary challenge. He appointed Ken Mehlman as campaign manager, and Karl Rove devised a political strategy.[82] Bush and the Republican platform emphasized a strong commitment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,[83] support for the USA PATRIOT Act,[84] a renewed shift in policy for constitutional amendments banning abortion and same-sex marriage,[83][85] reforming Social Security to create private investment accounts,[83] creation of an ownership society,[83] and opposing mandatory carbon emissions controls.[86] Bush also called for the implementation of a guest worker program for immigrants,[83] which was criticized by conservatives.[87]
+The Bush campaign advertised across the U.S. against Democratic candidates, including Bush's emerging opponent, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Kerry and other Democrats attacked Bush on the Iraq War, and accused him of failing to stimulate the economy and job growth. The Bush campaign portrayed Kerry as a staunch liberal who would raise taxes and increase the size of government. The Bush campaign continuously criticized Kerry's seemingly contradictory statements on the war in Iraq,[47] and argued that Kerry lacked the decisiveness and vision necessary for success in the War on Terror.
+Following the resignation of CIA director George Tenet in 2004, Bush nominated Porter Goss to head the agency. The White House ordered Goss to purge agency officers who were disloyal to the administration.[88] After Goss' appointment, many of the CIA's senior agents were fired or quit. The CIA has been accused of deliberately leaking classified information to undermine the 2004 election.[89]
+In the election, Bush carried 31 of 50 states, receiving a total of 286 electoral votes. He won an absolute majority of the popular vote (50.7 percent to his opponent's 48.3 percent).[90] Bush's father George H.W. Bush was the previous president who won an absolute majority of the popular vote; he accomplished that feat in the 1988 election. Additionally, it was the first time since Herbert Hoover's election in 1928 that a Republican president was elected alongside re-elected Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress.
+Bush had originally outlined an ambitious domestic agenda, but his priorities were significantly altered following the September 11 attacks.[91] Wars were waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and there were significant domestic debates regarding immigration, healthcare, Social Security, economic policy, and treatment of terrorist detainees. Over an eight-year period, Bush's once-high approval ratings[92] steadily declined, while his disapproval numbers increased significantly.[93] In 2007, the United States entered the longest post-World War II recession.[94]
+Bush took office during a period of economic recession in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble.[95] The terrorist attacks also impacted the economy.
+His administration increased federal government spending from $1.789 trillion to $2.983 trillion (60 percent), while revenues increased from $2.025 trillion to $2.524 trillion (from 2000 to 2008). Individual income tax revenues increased by 14 percent, corporate tax revenues by 50 percent, and customs and duties by 40 percent. Discretionary defense spending was increased by 107 percent, discretionary domestic spending by 62 percent, Medicare spending by 131 percent, social security by 51 percent, and income security spending by 130 percent. Cyclically adjusted, revenues rose by 35 percent and spending by 65 percent.[96] The increase in spending was more than under any predecessor since Lyndon B. Johnson.[97] The number of economic regulation governmental workers increased by 91,196.[98]
+The surplus in fiscal year 2000 was $237 billion—the third consecutive surplus and the largest surplus ever.[99] In 2001, Bush's budget estimated that there would be a $5.6 trillion surplus over the next ten years.[100] Facing congressional opposition, Bush held townhall style meetings across the U.S. in order to increase public support for his plan for a $1.35 trillion tax cut program—one of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history.[47] Bush argued that unspent government funds should be returned to taxpayers, saying "the surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money."[47] Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan warned of a recession and Bush stated that a tax cut would stimulate the economy and create jobs.[101] Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, opposed some of the tax cuts on the basis that they would contribute to budget deficits and undermine Social Security.[102] O'Neill disputes the claim, made in Bush's book Decision Points, that he never openly disagreed with him on planned tax cuts.[103] By 2003, the economy showed signs of improvement, though job growth remained stagnant.[47] Another tax cut was passed that year.
+Between 2001 and 2008, GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.125 percent,[104] less than for past business cycles.[105] Bush entered office with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 10,587, and the average peaked in October 2007 at over 14,000. When Bush left office, the average was at 7,949, one of the lowest levels of his presidency.[106] Only four other U.S. presidents have left office with the stock market lower than when they began.[107]
+Unemployment originally rose from 4.2 percent in January 2001 to 6.3 percent in June 2003, but subsequently dropped to 4.5 percent in July 2007.[108] Adjusted for inflation, median household income dropped by $1,175 between 2000 and 2007,[109] while Professor Ken Homa of Georgetown University has noted that "Median real after-tax household income went up two percent".[110] The poverty rate increased from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 12.3 percent in 2006 after peaking at 12.7 percent in 2004.[111] By October 2008, due to increases in spending,[112]:273 the national debt had risen to $11.3 trillion,[113] an increase of over 100 percent from 2000 when the debt was only $5.6 trillion.[114][115] Most debt was accumulated as a result of what became known as the "Bush tax cuts" and increased national security spending.[116] In March 2006, then-Senator Barack Obama said when he voted against raising the debt ceiling: "The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure."[117] By the end of Bush's presidency, unemployment climbed to 7.2 percent.[118]
+In December 2007, the United States entered the longest post–World War II recession,[94] caused by a housing market correction, a subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, and a declining dollar value.[119] In February 2008, 63,000 jobs were lost, a five-year record,[120] and in November, over 500,000 jobs were lost, which marked the largest loss of jobs in the United States in 34 years.[121] The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the last four months of 2008, 1.9 million jobs were lost.[122] By the end of 2008, the U.S. had lost a total of 2.6 million jobs.[123]
+To aid with the situation, Bush signed a $170 billion economic stimulus package which was intended to improve the economic situation by sending tax rebate checks to many Americans and providing tax breaks for struggling businesses. The Bush administration pushed for significantly increased regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003,[124] and after two years, the regulations passed the House but died in the Senate. Many Republican senators, as well as influential members of the Bush Administration, feared that the agency created by these regulations would merely be mimicking the private sector's risky practices.[125][126][127] In September 2008, the crisis became much more serious beginning with the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a federal bailout of American International Group for $85 billion.[128]
+Many economists and world governments determined that the situation had become the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.[129][130] Additional regulation over the housing market would have been beneficial, according to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.[131] Bush, meanwhile, proposed a financial rescue plan to buy back a large portion of the U.S. mortgage market.[132] Vince Reinhardt, a former Federal Reserve economist now at the American Enterprise Institute, said "it would have helped for the Bush administration to empower the folks at Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the comptroller of the currency and the FDIC to look at these issues more closely", and additionally, that it would have helped "for Congress to have held hearings".[126]
+Bush undertook a number of educational agendas, such as increasing the funding for the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in his first years of office and creating education programs to strengthen the grounding in science and mathematics for American high school students. Funding for the NIH was cut in 2006, the first such cut in 36 years, due to rising inflation.[133]
+One of the administration's early major initiatives was the No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to measure and close the gap between rich and poor student performance, provide options to parents with students in low-performing schools, and target more federal funding to low-income schools. This landmark education initiative passed with broad bipartisan support, including that of Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.[134] It was signed into law by Bush in early 2002.[135] Many contend that the initiative has been successful, as cited by the fact that students in the U.S. have performed significantly better on state reading and math tests since Bush signed "No Child Left Behind" into law.[136] Critics argue that it is underfunded[137] and that NCLBA's focus on "high-stakes testing" and quantitative outcomes is counterproductive.[138]
+In 2005, he announced a National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza to prepare the United States for a flu pandemic, which culminated in an implementation plan published by the Homeland Security Council in 2006.[139][140]
+After being re-elected, Bush signed into law a Medicare drug benefit program that, according to Jan Crawford, resulted in "the greatest expansion in America's welfare state in forty years" – the bill's costs approached $7 trillion.[112]:274 In 2007, Bush opposed and vetoed State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation, which was added by the Democrats onto a war funding bill and passed by Congress. The SCHIP legislation would have significantly expanded federally funded health care benefits and plans to children of some low-income families from about six million to ten million children. It was to be funded by an increase in the cigarette tax.[141] Bush viewed the legislation as a move toward socialized health care, and asserted that the program could benefit families making as much as $83,000 per year who did not need the help.[142]
+On May 21, 2008, Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA).[143][144] The bill aimed to protect Americans against health insurance and employment discrimination based on a person's genetic information. The issue had been debated for 13 years before it finally became law. The measure is designed to protect citizens without hindering genetic research.
+Following Republican efforts to pass the Medicare Act of 2003, Bush signed the bill, which included major changes to the Medicare program by providing beneficiaries with some assistance in paying for prescription drugs, while relying on private insurance for the delivery of benefits.[145] The retired persons lobby group AARP worked with the Bush Administration on the program and gave their endorsement. Bush said the law, estimated to cost $400 billion over the first ten years, would give the elderly "better choices and more control over their health care".[146]
+Bush began his second term by outlining a major initiative to "reform" Social Security,[147] which was facing record deficit projections beginning in 2005. Bush made it the centerpiece of his domestic agenda despite opposition from some in the U.S. Congress.[147] In his 2005 State of the Union Address, Bush discussed the potential impending bankruptcy of the program and outlined his new program, which included partial privatization of the system, personal Social Security accounts, and options to permit Americans to divert a portion of their Social Security tax (FICA) into secured investments.[147] Democrats opposed the proposal to partially privatize the system.[147]
+Bush embarked on a 60-day national tour, campaigning for his initiative in media events known as "Conversations on Social Security" in an attempt to gain public support.[148] Nevertheless, public support for the proposal declined,[149] and the House Republican leadership decided not to put Social Security reform on the priority list for the remainder of their 2005 legislative agenda.[150] The proposal's legislative prospects were further diminished by autumn 2005 due to political fallout from the response to Hurricane Katrina.[151] After the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, there was no prospect of further congressional action on the Bush proposal for the remainder of his term in office.
+Upon taking office in 2001, Bush stated his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, an amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which seeks to impose mandatory targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, citing that the treaty exempted 80 percent of the world's population[152] and would have cost tens of billions of dollars per year.[153] He also cited that the Senate had voted 95–0 in 1997 on a resolution expressing its disapproval of the protocol.
+In May 2001, Bush signed an executive order to create an interagency task force to streamline energy projects,[154] and later signed two other executive orders to tackle environmental issues.[155]
+In 2002, Bush announced the Clear Skies Act of 2003,[156] which aimed at amending the Clean Air Act to reduce air pollution through the use of emissions trading programs. Many experts argued that this legislation would have weakened the original legislation by allowing higher emission rates of pollutants than were previously legal.[157] The initiative was introduced to Congress, but failed to make it out of committee.
+Later in 2006, Bush declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, creating the largest marine reserve to date. The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument comprises 84 million acres (340,000 km2) and is home to 7,000 species of fish, birds, and other marine animals, many of which are specific to only those islands.[158] The move was hailed by conservationists for "its foresight and leadership in protecting this incredible area".[159]
+Bush has said he believes that global warming is real[160] and has noted that it is a serious problem, but he asserted there is a "debate over whether it's man-made or naturally caused".[161] The Bush Administration's stance on global warming remained controversial in the scientific and environmental communities. Critics have alleged that the administration[162] misinformed the public and did not do enough to reduce carbon emissions and deter global warming.[163]
+In his 2006 State of the Union Address, Bush declared, "America is addicted to oil" and announced his Advanced Energy Initiative to increase energy development research.[164]
+In his 2007 State of the Union Address, Bush renewed his pledge to work toward diminished reliance on foreign oil by reducing fossil fuel consumption and increasing alternative fuel production.[165] Amid high gasoline prices in 2008, Bush lifted a ban on offshore drilling.[166] However, the move was largely symbolic because there was still a federal law banning offshore drilling. Bush said, "This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil reserves is action from the U.S. Congress."[166] Bush had said in June 2008, "In the long run, the solution is to reduce demand for oil by promoting alternative energy technologies. My administration has worked with Congress to invest in gas-saving technologies like advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cells ... In the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil. And that means we need to increase supply, especially here at home. So my administration has repeatedly called on Congress to expand domestic oil production."[167]
+In his 2008 State of the Union Address, Bush announced that the U.S. would commit $2 billion over the next three years to a new international fund to promote clean energy technologies and fight climate change, saying, "Along with contributions from other countries, this fund will increase and accelerate the deployment of all forms of cleaner, more efficient technologies in developing nations like India and China, and help leverage substantial private-sector capital by making clean energy projects more financially attractive." He also announced plans to reaffirm the United States' commitment to work with major economies, and, through the UN, to complete an international agreement that will slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases; he stated, "This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride."[168]
+Federal funding for medical research involving the creation or destruction of human embryos through the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health has been forbidden by law since the passage of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment in 1995.[169] Bush has said he supports adult stem cell research and has supported federal legislation that finances adult stem cell research. However, Bush did not support embryonic stem cell research.[170] On August 9, 2001, Bush signed an executive order lifting the ban on federal funding for the 71 existing "lines" of stem cells,[171] but the ability of these existing lines to provide an adequate medium for testing has been questioned. Testing can be done on only 12 of the original lines, and all approved lines have been cultured in contact with mouse cells, which creates safety issues that complicate development and approval of therapies from these lines.[172] On July 19, 2006, Bush used his veto power for the first time in his presidency to veto the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. The bill would have repealed the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, thereby permitting federal money to be used for research where stem cells are derived from the destruction of an embryo.[173]
+Nearly 8 million immigrants came to the United States from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year period in the nation's history.[174] Almost half entered illegally.[175] In 2006, Bush urged Congress to allow more than 12 million illegal immigrants to work in the United States with the creation of a "temporary guest-worker program". Bush also urged Congress to provide additional funds for border security and committed to deploying 6,000 National Guard troops to the Mexico–United States border.[176] From May to June 2007, Bush strongly supported the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which was written by a bipartisan group of Senators with the active participation of the Bush administration.[177] The bill envisioned a legalization program for illegal immigrants, with an eventual path to citizenship; establishing a guest worker program; a series of border and work site enforcement measures; a reform of the green card application process and the introduction of a point-based "merit" system for green cards; elimination of "chain migration" and of the Diversity Immigrant Visa; and other measures. Bush argued that the lack of legal status denies the protections of U.S. laws to millions of people who face dangers of poverty and exploitation, and penalizes employers despite a demand for immigrant labor.[178] Bush contended that the proposed bill did not amount to amnesty.[179]
+A heated public debate followed, which resulted in a substantial rift within the Republican Party, most conservatives opposed it because of its legalization or amnesty provisions.[180] The bill was eventually defeated in the Senate on June 28, 2007, when a cloture motion failed on a 46–53 vote.[181] Bush expressed disappointment upon the defeat of one of his signature domestic initiatives.[182] The Bush administration later proposed a series of immigration enforcement measures that do not require a change in law.[183]
+On September 19, 2010, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Bush offered to accept 100,000 Palestinian refugees as American citizens if a permanent settlement had been reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.[184]
+Hurricane Katrina struck early in Bush's second term and was one of the most damaging natural disasters in U.S. history. Katrina formed in late August during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and devastated much of the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States, particularly New Orleans.[185]
+Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana on August 27[186] and in Mississippi and Alabama the following day.[187] He authorized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to manage the disaster, but his announcement failed to spur these agencies to action.[188] The eye of the hurricane made landfall on August 29, and New Orleans began to flood due to levee breaches; later that day, Bush declared a major disaster in Louisiana,[189] officially authorizing FEMA to start using federal funds to assist in the recovery effort.
+On August 30, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff declared it "an incident of national significance",[190] triggering the first use of the newly created National Response Plan. Three days later, on September 2, National Guard troops first entered the city of New Orleans.[191] The same day, Bush toured parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and declared that the success of the recovery effort up to that point was "not enough".[192]
+As the disaster in New Orleans intensified, critics charged that Bush was misrepresenting his administration's role in what they saw as a flawed response. Leaders attacked Bush for having appointed apparently incompetent leaders to positions of power at FEMA, notably Michael D. Brown;[193] it was also argued that the federal response was limited as a result of the Iraq War[194] and Bush himself did not act upon warnings of floods.[195][196] Bush responded to mounting criticism by accepting full responsibility for the federal government's failures in its handling of the emergency.[191] It has been argued that with Katrina, Bush passed a political tipping point from which he would not recover.[197]
+During Bush's second term, a controversy arose over the Justice Department's midterm dismissal of seven United States Attorneys.[198] The White House maintained that the U.S. attorneys were fired for poor performance.[199] Attorney General Alberto Gonzales later resigned over the issue, along with other senior members of the Justice Department.[200][201] The House Judiciary Committee issued subpoenas for advisers Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten to testify regarding this matter, but Bush directed Miers and Bolten to not comply with those subpoenas, invoking his right of executive privilege. Bush maintained that all his advisers were protected under a broad executive privilege protection to receive candid advice. The Justice Department determined that the President's order was legal.[202]
+Although Congressional investigations focused on whether the Justice Department and the White House were using the U.S. Attorney positions for political advantage, no official findings have been released. On March 10, 2008, the Congress filed a federal lawsuit to enforce their issued subpoenas.[203] On July 31, 2008, a United States district court judge ruled that Bush's top advisers were not immune from Congressional subpoenas.[204]
+In all, twelve Justice Department officials resigned rather than testify under oath before Congress. They included Attorney General Alberto Gonzales[205] and his chief of staff Kyle Sampson,[206] Gonzales' liaison to the White House Monica Goodling,[207] aide to the president Karl Rove[208] and his senior aide Sara Taylor.[209] In addition, legal counsel to the president Harriet Miers[210] and deputy chief of staff to the president Joshua Bolten[211] were both found in contempt of Congress.[209]
+In 2010, the Justice Department investigator concluded that though political considerations did play a part in as many as four of the attorney firings,[212] the firings were "inappropriately political", but not criminal. According to the prosecutors, there was insufficient evidence to pursue prosecution for any criminal offense.[213]
+During his presidential campaign, Bush's foreign policy platform included support for stronger economic and political relationship with Latin America, especially Mexico, and a reduction of involvement in "nation-building" and other small-scale military engagements. The administration pursued a national missile defense.[214] Bush was an advocate of China's entry into the World Trade Organization.[215]
+After the September 11 attacks on New York, Bush launched the War on Terror, in which the United States military and a small international coalition invaded Afghanistan. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, Bush referred to an "axis of evil" consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.[216] In 2003, Bush then launched the invasion of Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction, which he described as being part of the War on Terrorism.[217] Those invasions led to the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.[218]
+Bush began his second term with an emphasis on improving strained relations with European nations. He appointed long-time adviser Karen Hughes to oversee a global public relations campaign. Bush lauded the pro-democracy struggles in Georgia and Ukraine.[219]
+In March 2006, Bush reversed decades of U.S. policy when he visited the Republic of India in a trip focused particularly on areas of nuclear energy, counter-terrorism co-operation; and discussions that would eventually lead to the India–United States Civil Nuclear Agreement.[220][221] This was in stark contrast to the stance taken by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, whose approach and response to India after the 1998 nuclear tests has been characterized as "sanctions and hectoring".[222]
+Midway through Bush's second term, questions arose whether Bush was retreating from his freedom and democracy agenda, which was highlighted in policy changes toward some oil-rich former Soviet republics in central Asia.[223]
+In an address before both Houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush thanked the nations of the world for their support following the September 11 attacks. He specifically thanked UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for traveling to Washington to show "unity of purpose with America", and said "America has no truer friend than Great Britain."[224]
+The September 11 terrorist attacks were a major turning point in Bush's presidency. That evening, he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising a strong response to the attacks. He also emphasized the need for the nation to come together and comfort the families of the victims. Three days after the attacks, Bush visited Ground Zero and met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, firefighters, police officers, and volunteers. To much applause, Bush addressed the gathering via a megaphone while standing in a heap of rubble: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."[225]
+In a September 20 speech, Bush condemned Osama bin Laden and his organization Al-Qaeda, and issued an ultimatum to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was operating, to "hand over the terrorists, or ... share in their fate".[226]
+After September 11, Bush announced a global War on Terror. The Afghan Taliban regime was not forthcoming with Osama bin Laden, so Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime.[227] In his January 29, 2002 State of the Union Address, he asserted that an "axis of evil" consisting of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq was "arming to threaten the peace of the world" and "pose[d] a grave and growing danger".[228] The Bush Administration asserted both a right and the intention to wage preemptive war, or preventive war.[229] This became the basis for the Bush Doctrine which weakened the unprecedented levels of international and domestic support for the United States which had followed the September 11 attacks.[230]
+Dissent and criticism of Bush's leadership in the War on Terror increased as the war in Iraq continued.[231][232][233] In 2006, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq War had become the "cause célèbre for jihadists".[234][235]
+On October 7, 2001, U.S. and British forces initiated bombing campaigns that led to the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in Kabul on November 13. The main goals of the war were to defeat the Taliban, drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, and capture key al-Qaeda leaders. In December 2001, the Pentagon reported that the Taliban had been defeated,[236] but cautioned that the war would go on to continue weakening Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.[236] Later that month the UN had installed the Afghan Transitional Administration chaired by Hamid Karzai.[237][238]
+Efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden failed as he escaped a battle in December 2001 in the mountainous region of Tora Bora, which the Bush Administration later acknowledged to have resulted from a failure to commit enough U.S. ground troops.[239] It was not until May 2011, two years after Bush left office, that bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces under the Obama administration. Bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remains at large.
+Despite the initial success in driving the Taliban from power in Kabul, by early 2003 the Taliban was regrouping, amassing new funds and recruits.[240] The 2005 failure of Operation Red Wings showed that the Taliban had returned.[241] In 2006, the Taliban insurgency appeared larger, fiercer and better organized than expected, with large-scale allied offensives such as Operation Mountain Thrust attaining limited success.[242][243][244] As a result, Bush commissioned 3,500 additional troops to the country in March 2007.[245]
+Beginning with his January 29, 2002 State of the Union address, Bush began publicly focusing attention on Iraq, which he labeled as part of an "axis of evil" allied with terrorists and posing "a grave and growing danger" to U.S. interests through possession of weapons of mass destruction.[228][246]
+In the latter half of 2002, CIA reports contained assertions of Saddam Hussein's intent of reconstituting nuclear weapons programs, not properly accounting for Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, and that some Iraqi missiles had a range greater than allowed by the UN sanctions.[247][248] Contentions that the Bush Administration manipulated or exaggerated the threat and evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities would eventually become a major point of criticism for the president.[249][250]
+In late 2002 and early 2003, Bush urged the United Nations to enforce Iraqi disarmament mandates, precipitating a diplomatic crisis. In November 2002, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei led UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, but were advised by the U.S. to depart the country four days prior to the U.S. invasion, despite their requests for more time to complete their tasks.[251] The U.S. initially sought a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of military force but dropped the bid for UN approval due to vigorous opposition from several countries.[252] The Bush administration's claim that the Iraq War was part of the War on Terror had been questioned and contested by political analysts.[253]
+More than 20 nations (most notably the United Kingdom), designated the "coalition of the willing" joined the United States[254] in invading Iraq. They launched the invasion on March 20, 2003. The Iraqi military was quickly defeated. The capital, Baghdad, fell on April 9, 2003. On May 1, Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The initial success of U.S. operations increased his popularity, but the U.S. and allied forces faced a growing insurgency led by sectarian groups; Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech was later criticized as premature.[255] From 2004 until 2007, the situation in Iraq deteriorated further, with some observers arguing that there was a full-scale civil war in Iraq.[256] Bush's policies met with criticism, including demands domestically to set a timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq. The 2006 report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by James Baker, concluded that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating". While Bush admitted there were strategic mistakes made in regards to the stability of Iraq,[257] he maintained he would not change the overall Iraq strategy.[258][259] According to Iraq Body Count, some 251,000 Iraqis have been killed in the civil war following the U.S.-led invasion, including at least 163,841 civilians.[260]
+In January 2005, free, democratic elections were held in Iraq for the first time in 50 years.[261] According to Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffak al-Rubaie, "This is the greatest day in the history of this country."[261] Bush praised the event as well, saying that the Iraqis "have taken rightful control of their country's destiny".[261] This led to the election of Jalal Talabani as president and Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister of Iraq. A referendum to approve a constitution in Iraq was held in October 2005, supported by most Shiites and many Kurds.[262]
+On January 10, 2007, Bush announced a surge of 21,500 more troops for Iraq, as well as a job program for Iraqis, more reconstruction proposals, and $1.2 billion (equivalent to $1.5 billion in 2019) for these programs.[263] On May 1, 2007, Bush used his second-ever veto to reject a bill setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops,[264] saying the debate over the conflict was "understandable" but insisting that a continued U.S. presence there was crucial.[265]
+In March 2008, Bush praised the Iraqi government's "bold decision" to launch the Battle of Basra against the Mahdi Army, calling it "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq".[266] He said he would carefully weigh recommendations from his commanding General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about how to proceed after the end of the military buildup in the summer of 2008. He also praised the Iraqis' legislative achievements, including a pension law, a revised de-Baathification law, a new budget, an amnesty law, and a provincial powers measure that, he said, set the stage for the Iraqi elections.[267] By July 2008, American troop deaths had reached their lowest number since the war began,[268] and due to increased stability in Iraq, Bush announced the withdrawal of additional American forces.[268] During his last visit in Iraq in December 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw both of his shoes to Bush amid official press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.[269] Al-Zaidi yelled the strikes on Bush as "farewell kiss" and "for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq."[270]
+In March 2010, Center for Public Integrity released a report that President Bush's administration had made more than 900 false pretenses in a two-year period about alleged threat of Iraq against the United States, as his rationale to engage war in Iraq.[271] Senior war crimes prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz has suggested that Bush should be tried in the International Criminal Court for '269 war crime charges' related to the Iraq War.[272][273]
+Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush issued an executive order that authorized the President's Surveillance Program. The new directive allowed the National Security Agency to monitor communications between suspected terrorists outside the U.S. and parties within the U.S. without obtaining a warrant, which previously had been required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.[274] As of 2009[update], the other provisions of the program remained highly classified.[275] Once the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel questioned its original legal opinion that FISA did not apply in a time of war, the program was subsequently re-authorized by the President on the basis that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists.[276] The program proved to be controversial; critics of the administration and organizations such as the American Bar Association argued that it was illegal.[277] In August 2006, a U.S. district court judge ruled that the NSA electronic surveillance program was unconstitutional,[278] but on July 6, 2007, that ruling was vacated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing.[279] On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders that the program would not be reauthorized by the President, but would be subjected to judicial oversight.[280] Later in 2007, the NSA launched a replacement for the program, referred to as PRISM, which was subject to the oversight of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[281] This program was not publicly revealed until reports by The Washington Post[281] and The Guardian[282] emerged in June 2013.[281]
+Bush authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and several other "enhanced interrogation techniques" that several critics, including Barack Obama, would label as torture.[283][284][285][286] Between 2002 and 2003, the CIA considered certain enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to be legal based on secret Justice Department legal opinions arguing that terror detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture, which was described as "an unconstitutional infringement of the President's authority to conduct war".[287][288] The CIA had exercised the technique on certain key terrorist suspects under authority given to it in the Bybee Memo from the Attorney General, though that memo was later withdrawn.[289] While not permitted by the U.S. Army Field Manuals which assert "that harsh interrogation tactics elicit unreliable information",[287] the Bush administration believed these enhanced interrogations "provided critical information" to preserve American lives.[290] Critics, such as former CIA officer Bob Baer, have stated that information was suspect, "you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough."[291]
+On October 17, 2006, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law.[292] The new rule was enacted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006),[293] which allowed the U.S. government to prosecute unlawful enemy combatants by military commission rather than a standard trial. The law also denied the detainees access to habeas corpus and barred the torture of prisoners. The provision of the law allowed the president to determine what constitutes "torture".[292]
+On March 8, 2008, Bush vetoed H.R. 2082,[294] a bill that would have expanded congressional oversight over the intelligence community and banned the use of waterboarding as well as other forms of interrogation not permitted under the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations, saying that "the bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the War on Terror".[295] In April 2009, the ACLU sued and won release of the secret memos that had authorized the Bush administration's interrogation tactics.[296] One memo detailed specific interrogation tactics including a footnote that described waterboarding as torture as well as that the form of waterboarding used by the CIA was far more intense than authorized by the Justice Department.[297]
+Bush publicly condemned Kim Jong-il of North Korea and identified North Korea as one of three states in an "axis of evil". He said that "the United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."[228] Within months, "both countries had walked away from their respective commitments under the U.S.–DPRK Agreed Framework of October 1994."[298] North Korea's October 9, 2006, detonation of a nuclear device further complicated Bush's foreign policy, which centered for both terms of his presidency on "[preventing] the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world".[228] Bush condemned North Korea's position, reaffirmed his commitment to "a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula", and said that "transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States", for which North Korea would be held accountable.[299] On May 7, 2007, North Korea agreed to shut down its nuclear reactors immediately pending the release of frozen funds held in a foreign bank account. This was a result of a series of three-way talks initiated by the United States and including China.[300] On September 2, 2007, North Korea agreed to disclose and dismantle all its nuclear programs by the end of 2007.[301] By May 2009, North Korea had restarted its nuclear program and threatened to attack South Korea.[302]
+On June 22, 2010, "While South Korea prospers, the people of North Korea have suffered profoundly," he said, adding that communism had resulted in dire poverty, mass starvation and brutal suppression. "In recent years," he went on to say, "the suffering has been compounded by the leader who wasted North Korea's precious few resources on personal luxuries and nuclear weapons programs."[303]
+Bush expanded economic sanctions on Syria.[304] In 2003, Bush signed the Syria Accountability Act, which expanded sanctions on Syria. In early 2007, the Treasury Department, acting on a June 2005 executive order, froze American bank accounts of Syria's Higher Institute of Applied Science and Technology, Electronics Institute, and National Standards and Calibration Laboratory. Bush's order prohibits Americans from doing business with these institutions suspected of helping spread weapons of mass destruction[305] and being supportive of terrorism.[306] Under separate executive orders signed by Bush in 2004 and later 2007, the Treasury Department froze the assets of two Lebanese and two Syrians, accusing them of activities to "undermine the legitimate political process in Lebanon" in November 2007. Those designated included: Assaad Halim Hardan, a member of Lebanon's parliament and current leader of the Syrian Socialist National Party; Wi'am Wahhab, a former member of Lebanon's government (Minister of the Environment) under Prime Minister Omar Karami (2004–2005); Hafiz Makhluf, a colonel and senior official in the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate and a cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and Muhammad Nasif Khayrbik, identified as a close adviser to Assad.[307]
+In the State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush outlined a five-year strategy for global emergency AIDS relief, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Bush announced $15 billion for this effort[308] which directly supported life-saving antiretroviral treatment for more than 3.2 million men, women and children worldwide.[309] The U.S. government had spent some $44 billion on the project since 2003 (a figure that includes $7 billion contributed to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a multilateral organization),[310] which saved an estimated five million lives.[311] According to The New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, "Bush did more to stop AIDS and more to help Africa than any president before or since."[311]
+On May 10, 2005, Vladimir Arutyunian, a native Georgian who was born to a family of ethnic Armenians, threw a live hand grenade toward a podium where Bush was speaking at Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was seated nearby. It landed in the crowd about 65 feet (20 m) from the podium after hitting a girl, but it did not detonate. Arutyunian was arrested in July 2005, confessed, was convicted and was given a life sentence in January 2006.[312]
+Bush withdrew U.S. support for several international agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia. He also signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia.
+Bush emphasized a careful approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; he denounced Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat for his support of violence, but sponsored dialogues between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Bush supported Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan, and lauded the democratic elections held in Palestine after Arafat's death.
+In July 2001, Bush visited Pope John Paul II at Castel Gandolfo.[313]
+Bush also expressed U.S. support for the defense of Taiwan following the stand-off in April 2001 with the People's Republic of China over the Hainan Island incident, when an EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided with a People's Liberation Army Air Force jet, leading to the detention of U.S. personnel. From 2003 to 2004, Bush authorized U.S. military intervention in Haiti and Liberia to protect U.S. interests. Bush condemned the militia attacks Darfur and denounced the killings in Sudan as genocide.[314] Bush said an international peacekeeping presence was critical in Darfur, but he opposed referring the situation to the International Criminal Court.
+On June 10, 2007, Bush met with Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha and became the first president to visit Albania.[315] Bush has voiced his support for the independence of Kosovo.[316] Bush opposed South Ossetia's independence.[317] On August 15, 2008, Bush said of Russia's invasion of the country of Georgia: "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."[318]
+Bush opened the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Departing from previous practice, he stood among a group of U.S. athletes rather than from a ceremonial stand or box, saying: "On behalf of a proud, determined, and grateful nation, I declare open the Games of Salt Lake City, celebrating the Olympic Winter Games."[319] In 2008, in the course of a good-will trip to Asia, he attended the Summer Olympics in Beijing.[320]
+Bush twice invoked Section 3 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows a president to temporarily transfer the powers and duties of his office to the vice president, who then becomes acting president. On June 29, 2002, Bush underwent a colonoscopy and chose to invoke Section 3 of the amendment, making Vice President Dick Cheney the acting president. The medical procedure began at 7:09 am. EDT and ended at 7:29 am. EDT. Bush woke up twenty minutes later, but did not resume his presidential powers and duties until 9:24 am. EDT after the president's doctor, Richard Tubb, conducted an overall examination. Tubb said he recommended the additional time to make sure the sedative had no after effects. On July 21, 2007, Bush again invoked Section 3 in response to having to undergo a colonoscopy, again making Vice President Cheney the acting president. Bush invoked Section 3 at 7:16 a.m. EDT. He reclaimed his powers at 9:21 a.m. EDT. In both cases, Bush specifically cited Section 3 when he transferred the presidential powers to the Vice President and when he reclaimed those powers.[321]
+Following the announcement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement on July 1, 2005, Bush nominated John Roberts to succeed her. On September 5, following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, this nomination was withdrawn and Bush instead nominated Roberts for Chief Justice to succeed Rehnquist. Roberts was confirmed by the Senate as the 17th Chief Justice on September 29, 2005.
+On October 3, 2005, Bush nominated long time White House Counsel Harriet Miers for O'Connor's position. After facing significant opposition from both parties, who found her to be ill-prepared and uninformed on the law,[112]:278 Miers asked that her name be withdrawn on October 27. Four days later, on October 31, Bush nominated federal appellate judge Samuel Alito. Alito was confirmed as the 110th Supreme Court Justice on January 31, 2006.[322]
+In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Bush appointed 61 judges to the United States courts of appeals and 261 judges to the United States district courts. Each of these numbers, along with his total of 324 judicial appointments, is third in American history, behind both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Bush experienced a number of judicial appointment controversies. Debate during one confirmation session lasted "39 stupefying hours" according to The New York Times. On August 3, 2001, the Senate did not consent to keep existing nominations in status quo, returning 40 judicial nominations, and 164 total nominations.[323][324][325]
+At the outset, Judicature magazine noted that the "Senate Democrats were gearing up for the approaching confirmation hearings" before the first set of nominees were sent to the Senate. It then cites The New York Times as saying "Senate Democrats have pledged they will not automatically vote to confirm Mr. Bush's judicial nominees and will subject them to intense scrutiny."[326]
+The Senate had confirmed only eight of Bush's 60 judicial nominations by October 2001. In February 2003, the Democrats successfully filibustered the nomination of Miguel Estrada.[327]
+Bush's upbringing in West Texas, his accent, his vacations on his Texas ranch, and his penchant for country metaphors contribute to his folksy, American cowboy image.[328][329] "I think people look at him and think John Wayne", said Piers Morgan, editor of the British Daily Mirror.[330]
+Bush has been parodied by the media,[331] comedians, and other politicians.[332] Detractors tended to cite linguistic errors made by Bush during his public speeches, which are colloquially referred to as Bushisms.[333]
+In contrast to his father—who was perceived as having troubles with an overarching unifying theme—Bush embraced larger visions and was seen as a man of larger ideas and associated huge risks.[334]
+Tony Blair wrote in 2010 that the caricature of Bush as being dumb is "ludicrous" and that Bush is "very smart".[335] In an interview with Playboy, The New York Times columnist David Brooks said Bush "was 60 IQ points smarter in private than he was in public. He doesn't want anybody to think he's smarter than they are, so puts on a Texas act."[336]
+Bush began his presidency with approval ratings near 50 percent.[337] After the September 11 attacks, Bush gained an approval rating of 90 percent,[338] maintaining 80 to 90 percent approval for four months after the attacks. It remained over 50 percent during most of his first term[8] and then fell to as low as 19 percent in his second term.[339]
+In 2000 and again in 2004, Time magazine named George W. Bush as its Person of the Year, a title awarded to someone who the editors believe "has done the most to influence the events of the year".[340] In May 2004, Gallup reported that 89 percent of the Republican electorate approved of Bush.[341] However, the support waned due mostly to a minority of Republicans' frustration with him on issues of spending, illegal immigration, and Middle Eastern affairs.[342]
+Within the United States armed forces, according to an unscientific survey, the president was strongly supported in the 2004 presidential elections.[343] While 73 percent of military personnel said they would vote for Bush, 18 percent preferred his Democratic rival, John Kerry.[343] According to Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who has studied the political leanings of the U.S. military, members of the armed services supported Bush because they found him more likely than Kerry to complete the War in Iraq.[343]
+Bush's approval rating went below the 50 percent mark in AP-Ipsos polling in December 2004.[344] Thereafter, his approval ratings and approval of his handling of domestic and foreign policy issues steadily dropped. After his re-election in 2004, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum[4][5][345] for his handling of the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina,[6][7][346] and to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance, the Plame affair, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp controversies.[347]
+Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. Polls conducted in 2006 showed an average of 37 percent approval ratings for Bush,[348] the lowest for any second-term president at that point in his term since Harry S. Truman in March 1951 (when Truman's approval rating was 28 percent),[344][349] which contributed to what Bush called the "thumping" of the Republican Party in the 2006 mid-term elections.[350] Throughout most of 2007, Bush's approval rating hovered in the mid-thirties;[351] the average for his entire second term was 37 percent, according to Gallup.[352]
+By the beginning of 2008, his final year in office, Bush's approval rating had dropped to a low of just 19 percent, largely from the loss of support among Republicans.[339] Commenting on his low poll numbers and accusations of being "the worst president,"[353][354] Bush would say, "I make decisions on what I think is right for the United States based upon principles. I frankly don't give a damn about the polls."[355]
+There were calls for Bush's impeachment, though most polls showed a plurality of Americans would not support such an action.[356] The arguments offered for impeachment usually centered on the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy,[357] the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq, and alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions.[358] Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who had run against Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign, introduced 35 articles of impeachment on the floor of the House of Representatives against Bush on June 9, 2008, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared that impeachment was "off the table".[359]
+In April 2008, Bush's disapproval ratings reached the highest ever recorded for any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup poll, with 69 percent of those polled disapproving of the job Bush was doing as president and 28 percent approving—although the majority (66 percent) of Republicans still approved of his job performance.[360]
+In polls conducted in the fall, just before the 2008 election, his approval ratings remained at record lows of 19 to 20 percent,[361][362] while his disapproval ratings ranged from 67 percent to as high as 75 percent.[362][363] In polling conducted January 9–11, 2009, his final job approval rating by Gallup was 34 percent, which placed him on par with Jimmy Carter and Harry S. Truman, the other presidents whose final Gallup ratings measured in the low 30s (Richard Nixon's final Gallup approval rating was even lower, at 24 percent).[364] According to a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted January 11–15, 2009, Bush's final approval rating in office was 22 percent, the lowest in American history.[361]
+Bush was criticized internationally and targeted by the global anti-war and anti-globalization movements for his administration's foreign policy.[365][366] Views of him within the international community—even in France, a close ally of the United States—were more negative than those of most previous American presidents.[367]
+Bush was described as having especially close personal relationships with Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and Vicente Fox of Mexico, although formal relations were sometimes strained.[368][369][370] Other leaders, such as Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan,[371] Yoweri Museveni of Uganda,[372] José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain,[373] and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,[374] openly criticized the president. Later in Bush's presidency, tensions arose between him and Vladimir Putin, which led to a cooling of their relationship.[375]
+In 2006, most respondents in 18 of 21 countries surveyed around the world were found to hold an unfavorable opinion of Bush. Respondents indicated that they judged his administration as negative for world security.[376][377] In 2007, the Pew Global Attitudes Project reported that during the Bush presidency, attitudes towards the United States, and towards Americans, became less favorable around the world.[378] The Pew Research Center's 2007 Global Attitudes poll found that in only nine countries of 47 did most respondents express "a lot of confidence" or "some confidence" in Bush: Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Israel, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, and Uganda.[379] A March 2007 survey of Arab opinion conducted by Zogby International and the University of Maryland found that Bush was the most disliked leader in the Arab world.[380]
+During a June 2007 visit to the predominantly Muslim[381] Albania, Bush was greeted enthusiastically. Albania has a population of 2.8 million,[382] has troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the country's government is highly supportive of American foreign policy.[383] A huge image of the President was hung in the middle of the capital city of Tirana flanked by Albanian and American flags while a local street was named after him.[384][385] A shirt-sleeved statue of Bush was unveiled in Fushë-Krujë, a few kilometers northwest of Tirana.[386] The Bush administration's support for the independence of Albanian-majority Kosovo, while endearing him to the Albanians, has troubled U.S. relations with Serbia, leading to the February 2008 torching of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade.[387]
+On May 7, 2005, during an official state visit to Latvia, Bush was awarded the Order of the Three Stars presented to him by President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga.[388] A few places outside the United States bear Bush's name. In 2005, the Tbilisi City Council voted to rename a street in honor of the U.S. president.[389] Previously known as Melaani Drive, the street links the Georgian capital's airport with the city center and was used by Bush's motorcade during his visit four months earlier.[390] A street in Tirana, formerly known as Rruga Punëtorët e Rilindjes, situated directly outside the Albanian Parliament, was renamed after Bush a few days before he made the first-ever visit by an American president to Albania in June 2007.[391] In Jerusalem, a small plaza with a monument bearing his name is also dedicated to Bush.[392]
+In 2012, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves awarded Bush the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana for his work in expanding NATO.[393]
+Two elementary schools are named after him: George W. Bush Elementary School of the Stockton Unified School District in Stockton, California,[394] and George W. Bush Elementary School of the Wylie Independent School District in St. Paul, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.[395]
+Following the inauguration of Barack Obama, Bush and his family flew from Andrews Air Force Base to a homecoming celebration in Midland, Texas, following which they returned to their ranch in Crawford, Texas.[396] They bought a home in the Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, where they settled down.[397]
+He makes regular appearances at various events throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area, most notably when he conducted the opening coin toss at the Dallas Cowboys first game in the team's new stadium in Arlington[398] and an April 2009 visit to a Texas Rangers game, where he thanked the people of Dallas for helping him settle in and was met with a standing ovation.[399] He also attended every home playoff game for the Texas Rangers 2010 season and, accompanied by his father, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington for Game 4 of the 2010 World Series on October 31, 2010.[400]
+On August 6, 2013, Bush was successfully treated for a coronary artery blockage with a stent. The blockage had been found during an annual medical examination.[401]
+In reaction to the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers, Bush stated: "Laura and I are heartbroken by the heinous acts of violence in our city last night. Murdering the innocent is always evil, never more so than when the lives taken belong to those who protect our families and communities."[402]
+Since leaving office, Bush has kept a relatively low profile[403] though he has made public appearances, most notably after the release of his memoirs in 2010 and for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2011. In March 2009, he delivered his first post-presidency speech in Calgary, Alberta,[404][405] appeared via video on The Colbert Report during which he praised U.S. troops for earning a "special place in American history,"[406] and attended the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy.[407] Bush made his debut as a motivational speaker on October 26 at the "Get Motivated" seminar in Dallas.[408] In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting on November 5, 2009, the Bushes paid an undisclosed visit to the survivors and the victims' families the day following the shooting, having contacted the base commander requesting that the visit be private and not involve press coverage.[409]
+Bush released his memoirs, Decision Points, on November 9, 2010. During a pre-release appearance promoting the book, Bush said he considered his biggest accomplishment to be keeping "the country safe amid a real danger", and his greatest failure to be his inability to secure the passage of Social Security reform.[410] He also made news defending his administration's enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying, "I'd do it again to save lives."[411]
+In 2012, he wrote the foreword of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, an economics book published by the George W. Bush Presidential Center.[412][413] He also presented the book at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas.[414]
+Bush appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on November 19, 2013, along with the former First Lady, Laura Bush. When asked by Leno why he does not comment publicly about the Obama administration, Bush said, "I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor."[415] Despite this statement, on April 25, 2015, Bush criticized President Obama at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Bush criticized Obama's handling of Iran, specifically with respect to sanctions and a nuclear deal, saying: "You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That's how Americans should view the deal." Bush also attacked Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, calling it a "strategic blunder", borrowing a term that had been used by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.[416]
+Alongside the 2014 United States–Africa Leaders Summit, Bush, Michelle Obama, the State Department, and the George W. Bush Institute hosted a daylong forum on education and health with the spouses of the African leaders attending the summit. Bush urged African leaders to avoid discriminatory laws that make the treatment of HIV/AIDS more difficult.[417]
+Bush has spoken in favor of increased global participation of women in politics and societal matters in foreign countries.[418][419]
+On November 2, 2014, Bush spoke at an event to 200 business and civic leaders at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum to raise awareness for the upcoming Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.[33][420]
+Bush published a biography of his father, George Bush, called 41: A Portrait of My Father. It was released on November 11, 2014.[421]
+In an interview published by Israel Hayom magazine on June 12, 2015, Bush said "boots on the ground" would be needed in order to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). He added that people had said during his presidency that he should withdraw American troops from Iraq, but he chose the opposite, sending 30,000 more troops in order to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that they indeed were defeated. Bush was also asked about Iran but declined to answer, stating that any answer he gives would be interpreted as undermining Obama.[422]
+In February 2016, George W. Bush spoke and campaigned for his brother Jeb Bush in South Carolina during a rally for the Jeb Bush presidential campaign in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries.[423]
+While Bush endorsed the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, he declined to endorse the 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump[424] and he did not attend the 2016 Republican National Convention, which formally nominated Trump.[425] On the eve of Trump's nomination, it was reported that Bush had privately expressed concern about the current direction of the Republican Party and told a group of his former aides and advisors, "I'm worried that I will be the last Republican president."[426][427] Bush and his wife Laura did not vote for Trump in the 2016 presidential election according to a spokesperson for the Bush family, instead choosing to leave their presidential ballots blank.[428] After the election, Bush, his father, and his brother Jeb called Trump on the phone to congratulate him on his victory.[429] Both he and Laura attended Trump's inauguration, and images of Bush struggling to put on a rain poncho during the ceremony became an internet meme.[430] While leaving the event, Bush allegedly described the ceremony as "some weird shit".[431]
+In February 2017, Bush released a book of his own portraits of veterans called Portraits of Courage (full title: Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief's Tribute to America's Warriors).[432]
+Following the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bush and his father released a joint statement condemning the violence and ideologies present at the rally; "America must always reject racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred in all forms. As we pray for Charlottesville, we are all reminded of the fundamental truths recorded by that city's most prominent citizen in the Declaration of Independence: we are all created equal and endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. We know these truths to be everlasting because we have seen the decency and greatness of our country."[433] Their statement came as President Trump was facing controversy over his statements about the rally. Subsequently, Bush gave a speech in New York where he noted of the current political climate, "Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication." He continued, "Bigotry in any form is blasphemy against the American creed and it means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation," while urging citizens to oppose threats to American democracy and be positive role models for young people.[434] The speech was widely interpreted as a denouncement of Donald Trump and his ideologies, despite Bush not mentioning Trump by name.[434][435][436][437]
+In April 2018, Bush and his father met in Texas with Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.[438]
+In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's passing, George Bush visited South Korea to pay respects to Roh and gave a short eulogy.[439]
+On June 1, 2020 Bush released a statement addressing the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide reaction and protests following Floyd's death.[440][441] In the statement Bush wrote that he and former first lady Laura Bush "are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country".[442] He also elaborated on the racial injustices perpetrated by the police saying, that "it is time for America to examine our tragic failures", adding "Many doubt the justice of our country, and with good reason. Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions".[443]
+In January 2010, at President Obama's request, Bush and Bill Clinton established the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to raise contributions for relief and recovery efforts following the 2010 Haiti earthquake earlier that month.[444]
+On May 2, 2011, President Obama called Bush, who was at a restaurant with his wife, to inform him that Osama bin Laden had been killed.[445] The Bushes joined the Obamas in New York City to mark the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. At the Ground Zero memorial, Bush read a letter that President Abraham Lincoln wrote to a widow who had lost five sons during the Civil War.[446]
+On September 7, 2017, Bush partnered with former presidents Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama to work with One America Appeal to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in the Gulf Coast and Texas communities.[447]
+Over the years, President Bush has had a good-natured friendship with Michelle Obama. "President Bush and I, we are forever seatmates because of protocol, and that's how we sit at all the official functions," Mrs. Obama told the Today Show. "He's my partner in crime at every major thing where all the 'formers' gather. So we're together all the time." She later added, "I love him to death. He's a wonderful man, he's a funny man."[448] Bush and Obama have sat next to each other at many events including the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in Selma (2015), the interfaith memorial service for the victims in Dallas (2016), the opening at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), and at the funerals for Nancy Reagan (2016), and John McCain (2018). Bush famously passed mints to Mrs. Obama during the McCain funeral in September 2018 and gave them to her again during the funeral of his father in December 2018.[449]
+After serving as president, Bush began painting as a hobby after reading Winston Churchill's essay "Painting as a Pastime." Subjects have included people, dogs, and still life.[450] He has also painted self-portraits and portraits of world leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Tony Blair.[451][452][453] In February 2017, Bush released a book of portraits of veterans, Portraits of Courage.[432] The net proceeds from his book are donated to the George W. Bush Presidential Center. In May 2019, on the 10th anniversary of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's passing, George Bush drew a portrait of Roh to give to his family.[454]
+President Bush's legacy continues to develop today. Supporters credit Bush's counterterrorism policies with preventing another major terrorist attack from occurring in the U.S. after 9/11 and also praise individual policies such as the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. Critics often point to his handling of the Iraq War, specifically the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, that were the main rationale behind the initial invasion—as well as his handling of tax policy, Hurricane Katrina, climate change and the 2008 financial crisis—as proof that George W. Bush was unfit to be president.[458][459][460]
+Several historians and commentators hold that Bush was one of the most consequential presidents in American history. Princeton University scholar Julian Zelizer described Bush's presidency as a "transformative" one, and said that "some people hate him, some people love him, but I do think he'll have a much more substantive perception as time goes on".[461] Bryon Williams of The Huffington Post referred to Bush as "the most noteworthy president since FDR" and said the Patriot Act "increased authority of the executive branch at the expense of judicial opinions about when searches and seizures are reasonable" as evidence.[462] Bush's administration presided over the largest tax cuts since the presidency of Ronald Reagan,[463] and his homeland security reforms proved to be the most significant expansion of the federal government since the Great Society.[464] Much of these policies have endured in the administrations of his two immediate successors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.[465][466]
+The George W. Bush presidency has been ranked among the worst in surveys of presidential scholars published in the late 2000s and 2010s.[467][468][469]
+A 2010 Siena Research Institute survey of the opinions of historians, political scientists, and presidential scholars ranked him 39th out of 43 presidents. The survey respondents gave President Bush low ratings on his handling of the U.S. economy, communication, ability to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments, and intelligence.[470] Bush said in 2013, "Ultimately history will judge the decisions I made, and I won't be around because it will take time for the objective historians to show up. So I am pretty comfortable with it. I did what I did."[471]
+Among the public, his reputation has improved somewhat since his presidency ended in 2009. In February 2012, Gallup reported that "Americans still rate George W. Bush among the worst presidents, though their views have become more positive in the three years since he left office."[472] Gallup had earlier noted that Bush's favorability ratings in public opinion surveys had begun to rise a year after he had left office, from 40 percent in January 2009 and 35 percent in March 2009, to 45 percent in July 2010, a period during which he had remained largely out of the news.[473] Other pollsters have noted similar trends of slight improvement  in Bush's personal favorability since the end of his presidency.[474] In April 2013, Bush's approval rating stood at 47 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval in a poll jointly conducted for The Washington Post and ABC, his highest approval rating since December 2005. Bush had achieved notable gains among seniors, non-college whites, and moderate and conservative Democrats since leaving office, although majorities disapproved of his handling of the economy (53 percent) and the Iraq War (57 percent).[475] His 47 percent approval rating was equal to that of President Obama's in the same polling period.[476] A CNN poll conducted that same month found that 55 percent of Americans said Bush's presidency had been a failure, with opinions divided along party lines, and 43 percent of independents calling it a success.[477] Bush's public image saw greater improvement starting in 2017, which has been interpreted as Democrats viewing him more favorably in response to Donald Trump's presidency,[478][479] an assessment that has also been expressed by Bush himself.[480]

en/2185.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@

+George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (/ˈhændəl/;[a] born Georg Friederich Händel[b] [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhɛndl̩] (listen); 23 February 1685 (O.S.) [(N.S.) 5 March] – 14 April 1759)[2][c] was a German, later British, Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi and organ concertos. Handel received important training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in 1727.[5] He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition. He would become a huge influence on classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven.
+Within fifteen years, Handel had started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. Musicologist Winton Dean writes that his operas show that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order."[6] As Alexander's Feast (1736) was well received, Handel made a transition to English choral works. After his success with Messiah (1742) he never composed an Italian opera again. Almost blind, and having lived in England for nearly fifty years, he died in 1759, a respected and rich man. His funeral was given full state honours, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
+Handel is regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era, with works such as Messiah, Water Music, and Music for the Royal Fireworks remaining steadfastly popular.[7] One of his four coronation anthems, Zadok the Priest (1727), composed for the coronation of George II, has been performed at every subsequent British coronation, traditionally during the sovereign's anointing. Another of his English oratorios, Solomon (1748), has also remained popular, with the Sinfonia that opens act 3 (known more commonly as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba") featuring at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. Handel composed more than forty opera serias in over thirty years, and since the late 1960s, with the revival of baroque music and historically informed musical performance, interest in Handel's operas has grown.
+Handel was born in 1685 in Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg (then part of Brandenburg-Prussia), to Georg Händel and Dorothea Taust.[8] His father, aged sixty-three when George Frideric was born, was an eminent barber-surgeon who served the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and the Margraviate of Brandenburg.[9]
+Georg Händel (senior) was the son of a coppersmith, Valentin Händel (1582–1636), who had emigrated from Eisleben in 1608 with his first wife Anna Belching, the daughter of a master coppersmith. They were Protestants and chose reliably Protestant Saxony over Silesia, a Habsburg possession, as religious tensions mounted in the years before the Thirty Years War.[10] Halle was a relatively prosperous city, home of a salt-mining industry and center of trade (and member of the Hanseatic League).[11] The Margrave of Brandenburg became the administrator of the archiepiscopal territories of Mainz, including Magdeburg when they converted, and by the early 17th century held his court in Halle, which attracted renowned musicians.[d] Even the smaller churches all had "able organists and fair choirs",[e] and humanities and the letters thrived (Shakespeare was performed in the theaters early in the 17th century).[13] The Thirty Years War brought extensive destruction to Halle, and by the 1680s it was impoverished.[10] However, since the middle of the war the city had been under the administration of the Duke of Saxony, and soon after the end of the war he would bring musicians trained in Dresden to his court in Weissenfels.[14]
+The arts and music, however, flourished only among the higher strata (not only in Halle but throughout Germany),[15] of which Handel's family was not a member. Georg Händel (senior) was born at the beginning of the war, and was apprenticed to a barber in Halle at the age of 14, after his father died.[f] When he was 20, he married the widow of the official barber-surgeon of a suburb of Halle, inheriting his practice. With this, Georg determinedly began the process of becoming self-made; by dint of his "conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous" lifestyle,[16] he guided the five children he had with Anna who reached adulthood into the medical profession (except his youngest daughter, who married a government official).[17] Anna died in 1682. Within a year Georg married again, this time to the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Pastor Georg Taust of the Church of St. Bartholomew in Giebichenstein,[18] who himself came from a long line of Lutheran pastors.[16] Handel was the second child of this marriage; the first son was stillborn.[19] Two younger sisters were born after the birth of George Frideric: Dorthea Sophia, born 6 October 1687, and Johanna Christiana, born 10 January 1690.[20]
+Early in his life Handel is reported to have attended the Gymnasium in Halle,[21] where the headmaster, Johann Praetorius [de], was reputed to be an ardent musician.[22] Whether Handel remained there, and if he did for how long, is unknown, but many biographers suggest that he was withdrawn from school by his father, based on the characterization of him by Handel's first biographer, John Mainwaring. Mainwaring is the source for almost all information (little as it is) of Handel's childhood, and much of that information came from J.C. Smith, Jr., Handel's confidant and copyist.[23] Whether it came from Smith or elsewhere, Mainwaring frequently relates misinformation.[g] It is from Mainwaring that the portrait comes of Handel's father as implacably opposed to any musical education. Mainwaring writes that Georg Händel was "alarmed" at Handel's very early propensity for music,[h] "took every measure to oppose it", including forbidding any musical instrument in the house and preventing Handel from going to any house where they might be found.[25] This did nothing to dampen young Handel's inclination; in fact, it did the reverse. Mainwaring tells the story of Handel's secret attic spinet: Handel "found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep".[26] Although both John Hawkins and Charles Burney credited this tale, Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible" and a feat of "poetic imagination"[27] and Lang considers it one of the unproven "romantic stories" that surrounded Handel's childhood.[28] But Handel had to have had some experience with the keyboard to have made the impression in Weissenfels that resulted in his receiving formal musical training.[29]
+Sometime between the ages of seven and nine, Handel accompanied his father to Weissenfels where he came under the notice of one whom Handel thereafter always regarded throughout life as his benefactor,[30] Duke Johann Adolf I.[i] Somehow Handel made his way to the court organ in the palace chapel of the Holy Trinity, where he surprised everyone with his playing.[33] Overhearing this performance and noting the youth of the performer caused the Duke, whose suggestions were not to be disregarded, to recommend to Georg Händel that Handel be given musical instruction.[34] Handel's father engaged the organist at the Halle parish church, the young Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, to instruct Handel. Zachow would be the only teacher that Handel ever had.[28] Because of his church employment, Zachow was an organist "of the old school", reveling in fugues, canons and counterpoint.[30] But he was also familiar with developments in music across Europe and his own compositions "embraced the new concerted, dramatic style".[j] When Zachow discovered the talent of Handel, he introduced him "to a vast collection of German and Italian music, which he possessed, sacred and profane, vocal and instrumental compositions of different schools, different styles, and of every master".[30] Many traits considered "Handelian" can be traced back to Zachow's music.[36] At the same time Handel continued practice on the harpsichord, learned violin and organ, but according to Burney his special affection was for the hautbois (oboe).[37] Schoelcher speculates that his youthful devotion to the instrument explains the large number of pieces he composed for oboe.[38]
+With respect to instruction in composition, in addition to having Handel apply himself to traditional fugue and cantus firmus work, Zachow, recognizing Handel's precocious talents, systematically introduced Handel to the variety of styles and masterworks contained in his extensive library. He did this by requiring Handel to copy selected scores. "I used to write like the devil in those days", Handel recalled much later.[39] Much of this copying was entered into a notebook that Handel maintained for the rest of his life. Although it has since disappeared, the notebook has been sufficiently described to understand what pieces Zachow wished Handel to study. Among the chief composers represented in this exercise book were Johann Krieger, an "old master" in the fugue and prominent organ composer, Johann Caspar Kerll, a representative of the "southern style" after his teacher Frescobaldi and imitated later by Handel,[k] Johann Jakob Froberger, an "internationalist" also closely studied by Buxtehude and Bach, and Georg Muffat, whose amalgam of French and Italian styles and his synthesis of musical forms influenced Handel.[41]
+Mainwaring writes that during this time Zachow had begun to have Handel assume some of his church duties. Zachow, Mainwaring asserts, was "often" absent, "from his love of company, and a chearful glass", and Handel therefore performed on organ frequently.[42] What is more, according to Mainwaring, Handel began composing, at the age of nine, church services for voice and instruments "and from that time actually did compose a service every week for three years successively."[43] Mainwaring ends this chapter of Handel's life by concluding that three or four years had been enough to allow Handel to surpass Zachow, and Handel had become "impatient for another situation"; "Berlin was the place agreed upon."[44] Carelessness with dates or sequences (and possibly imaginative interpretation by Mainwaring) makes this period confused.[l]
+Handel's father died on 11 February 1697.[45] It was German custom for friends and family to compose funeral odes for a substantial burgher like Georg,[46] and young Handel discharged his duty with a poem dated 18 February and signed with his name and (in deference to his father's wishes) "dedicated to the liberal arts."[47] At the time Handel was studying either at Halle's Lutheran Gymnasium or the Latin School.[46]
+Mainwaring has Handel traveling to Berlin the next year, 1698.[44] The problem with Mainwaring as an authority for this date, however, is that he tells of how Handel's father communicated with the "king"[m] during Handel's stay, declining the Court's offer to send Handel to Italy on a stipend[49] and that his father died "after his return from Berlin."[50] But since Georg Händel died in 1697, either the date of the trip or Mainwaring's statements about Handel's father must be in error. Early biographers solved the problem by making the year of the trip 1696, then noting that at the age of 11 Handel would need a guardian, so they have Handel's father or a friend of the family accompany him, all the while puzzling over why the elder Handel, who wanted Handel to become a lawyer, would spend the sum to lead his son further into the temptation of music as a career.[51] Schoelcher for example has Handel traveling to Berlin at 11, meeting both Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti in Berlin and then returning at the direction of his father.[52] But Ariosti was not in Berlin before the death of Handel's father,[53] and Handel could not have met Bononcini in Berlin before 1702.[54] Modern biographers either accept the year as 1698, since most reliable older authorities agree with it,[n] and discount what Mainwaring says about what took place during the trip or assume that Mainwaring conflated two or more visits to Berlin, as he did with Handel's later trips to Venice.[55]
+Perhaps to fulfill a promise to his father or simply because he saw himself as "dedicated to the liberal arts," on 10 February 1702 Handel matriculated at the University of Halle.[56] That university had only recently been founded. In 1694 the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III (later Prussian King Frederick I) created the school, largely to provide a lecture forum for the jurist Christian Thomasius who had been expelled from Leipzig for his liberal views.[13] Händel did not enroll in the faculty of law, although he almost certainly attended lectures.[57] Thomasius was an intellectual and academic crusader who was the first German academic to lecture in German and also denounced witch trials. Lang believes that Thomasius instilled in Händel a "respect for the dignity and freedom of man's mind and the solemn majesty of the law," principles that would have drawn him to and kept him in England for half a century.[58] Handel also there encountered theologian and professor of Oriental languages August Hermann Francke, who was particularly solicitous of children, particularly orphans. The orphanage he founded became a model for Germany, and undoubtedly influenced Handel's own charitable impulse, when he assigned the rights of Messiah to London's Foundling Hospital.[59]
+Shortly after commencing his university education, Handel (though Lutheran[o]) on 13 March 1702 accepted the position of organist at the Calvinist Cathedral in Halle, the Domkirche, replacing J.C. Leporin, for whom he had acted as assistant.[61] The position, which was a one-year probationary appointment showed the foundation he had received from Zachow, for a church organist and cantor was a highly prestigious office. From it he received 5 thalers a year and lodgings in the run-down castle of Moritzburg. [62]
+Around this same time Handel made the acquaintance of Telemann. Four years Handel's senior, Telemann was studying law and assisting cantor Johann Kuhnau (Bach's predecessor at the Thomaskirche there). Telemann recalled forty years later in an autobiography for Mattheson's Grundlage: "The writing of the excellent Johann Kuhnau served as a model for me in fugue and counterpoint; but in fashioning melodic movements and examining them Handel and I were constantly occupied, frequently visiting each other as well as writing letters."[63]
+Although Mainwaring records that Handel wrote weekly when assistant to Zachow and as probationary organist at Domkirche part of his duty was to provide suitable music,[p] no sacred compositions from his Halle period can now be identified.[65] Mattheson, however, summarized his opinion of Handel's church cantatas written in Halle: "Handel in those days set very, very long arias and sheerly unending cantatas which, while not possessing the proper knack or correct taste, were perfect so far as harmony is concerned."[66]
+Early chamber works do exist, but it is difficult to date any of them to Handel's time in Halle. Many historians until recently followed Chrysander and designated the six trio sonatas for two oboes and basso continuo as his first known composition, supposedly written in 1696 (when Handel was 11).[67] Lang doubts the dating based on a handwritten date of a copy (1700) and stylistic considerations. Lang writes that the works "show thorough acquaintance with the distilled sonata style of the Corelli school" and are notable for "the formal security and the cleanness of the texture."[68] Hogwood considers all of the oboe trio sonatas spurious and even suggests that some parts cannot be performed on oboe.[69]  That authentic manuscript sources do not exist and that Handel never recycled any material from these works make their authenticity doubtful.[70] Other early chamber works were printed in Amsterdam in 1724 as opus 1, but it is impossible to tell which are early works in their original form, rather than later re-workings by Handel, a frequent practice of his.[68]
+Handel's probationary appointment to Domkirche expired in March 1703. By July[q] Handel was in Hamburg. Since he left no explanation for the move[r] biographers have offered their own speculation. Burrows believes that the answer can be found by untangling Mainwaring's confused chronology of the trip to Berlin. Burrows dates this trip to 1702 or 1703 (after his father's death) and concluded that since Handel (through a "friend and relation" at the Berlin court) turned down Frederick's offer to subsidize his musical education in Italy (with the implicit understanding that he would become a court musician on his return), Handel was no longer able to expect preferment (whether as musician, lawyer or otherwise) within Brandenburg-Prussia. And since he was attracted to secular, dramatic music (by meeting the Italians Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti and through the influence of Telemann), Hamburg, a free city with an established opera company, was the logical choice.[74] The question remains, however, why Handel rejected the King's offer, given that Italy was the center of opera. Lang suggests that, influenced by the teachings of Thomasius, Handel's character was such that he was unable to make himself subservient to anyone, even a king. Lang sees Handel as someone who could not accept class distinctions that required him to regard himself as a social inferior. "What Handel craved was personal freedom to raise himself out of his provincial milieu to a life of culture."[75] Burrows notes that like his father, Handel was able to accept royal (and aristocratic) favors without considering himself a court servant.[76] And so given the embarrassed financial condition of his mother,[50] Handel set off for Hamburg to obtain experience while supporting himself.
+In 1703 he accepted a position as violinist and harpsichordist in the orchestra of the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt.[77] There he met the composers Johann Mattheson, Christoph Graupner and Reinhard Keiser. His first two operas, Almira and Nero, were produced in 1705.[78] He produced two other operas, Daphne and Florindo, in 1708. It is unclear whether Handel directed these performances.
+According to Mainwaring, in 1706 Handel travelled to Italy at the invitation of Ferdinando de' Medici. Other sources say Handel was invited by Gian Gastone de' Medici, whom Handel had met in 1703–1704 in Hamburg.[79] De' Medici[which?], who had a keen interest in opera, was trying to make Florence Italy's musical capital by attracting the leading talents of his day. In Italy Handel met librettist Antonio Salvi, with whom he later collaborated. Handel left for Rome and, since opera was (temporarily) banned in the Papal States, composed sacred music for the Roman clergy. His famous Dixit Dominus (1707) is from this era. He also composed cantatas in pastoral style for musical gatherings in the palaces of duchess Aurora Sanseverino (whom Mainwaring called "Donna Laura")[80] one of the most influential patrons from the Kingdom of Naples, and cardinals Pietro Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphili and Carlo Colonna. Two oratorios, La resurrezione and Il trionfo del tempo, were produced in a private setting for Ruspoli and Ottoboni in 1709 and 1710, respectively. Rodrigo, his first all-Italian opera, was produced in the Cocomero theatre in Florence in 1707.[81] Agrippina was first produced in 1709 at Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice, owned by the Grimanis. The opera, with a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, ran for 27 nights successively.[82] The audience, thunderstruck with the grandeur and sublimity of his style,[83] applauded for Il caro Sassone ("the dear Saxon" – referring to Handel's German origins).
+In 1710, Handel became Kapellmeister to German prince George, the Elector of Hanover, who in 1714 would become King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.[84] He visited Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici and her husband in Düsseldorf on his way to London in 1710. With his opera Rinaldo, based on La Gerusalemme Liberata by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, Handel enjoyed great success, although it was composed quickly, with many borrowings from his older Italian works.[85] This work contains one of Handel's favourite arias, Cara sposa, amante cara, and the famous Lascia ch'io pianga.
+In 1712, Handel decided to settle permanently in England. In the summer of 1713 he lived at Mr Mathew Andrews' estate in Barn Elms, Surrey.[86][87] He received a yearly income of £200 from Queen Anne after composing for her the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, first performed in 1713.[88][89]
+One of his most important patrons was The 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, a young and extremely wealthy member of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family.[90] While living in the mansion of Lord Burlington, Handel wrote Amadigi di Gaula, a "magic" opera, about a damsel in distress, based on the tragedy by Antoine Houdar de la Motte.
+The conception of an opera as a coherent structure was slow to capture Handel's imagination[91] and he composed no operas for five years. In July 1717 Handel's Water Music was performed more than three times on the River Thames for the King and his guests. It is said the compositions spurred reconciliation between Handel and the King, supposedly annoyed by the composer's abandonment of his Hanover post.[92]
+In 1717 Handel became house composer at Cannons in Middlesex, where he laid the cornerstone for his future choral compositions in the Chandos Anthems.[93] Romain Rolland wrote that these anthems (or Psalms) stood in relation to Handel's oratorios, much the same way that the Italian cantatas stood to his operas: "splendid sketches of the more monumental works."[94] Another work, which he wrote for The 1st Duke of Chandos, the owner of Cannons, was Acis and Galatea: during Handel's lifetime it was his most performed work. Winton Dean wrote, "the music catches breath and disturbs the memory".[95]
+In 1719 the Duke of Chandos became one of the composer's important patrons and main subscribers to his new opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, but his patronage declined after Chandos lost money in the South Sea bubble, which burst in 1720 in one of history's greatest financial cataclysms. Handel himself invested in South Sea stock in 1716, when prices were low[96] and sold before 1720.[97]
+In May 1719, The 1st Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chamberlain, ordered Handel to look for new singers.[98] Handel travelled to Dresden to attend the newly built opera. He saw Teofane by Antonio Lotti, and engaged members of the cast for the Royal Academy of Music, founded by a group of aristocrats to assure themselves a constant supply of baroque opera or opera seria. Handel may have invited John Smith, his fellow student in Halle, and his son Johann Christoph Schmidt, to become his secretary and amanuensis.[99] By 1723 he had moved into a Georgian house at 25 Brook Street, which he rented for the rest of his life.[100] This house, where he rehearsed, copied music and sold tickets, is now the Handel House Museum.[s] During twelve months between 1724 and 1725, Handel wrote three outstanding and successful operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Handel's operas are filled with da capo arias, such as Svegliatevi nel core. After composing Silete venti, he concentrated on opera and stopped writing cantatas. Scipio, from which the regimental slow march of the British Grenadier Guards is derived,[101] was performed as a stopgap, waiting for the arrival of Faustina Bordoni.
+In 1727 Handel was commissioned to write four anthems for the Coronation ceremony of King George II. One of these, Zadok the Priest, has been played at every British coronation ceremony since.[102] In 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which made fun of the type of Italian opera Handel had popularised in London, premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time.[103] After nine years the Royal Academy of Music ceased to function but Handel soon started a new company.
+The Queen's Theatre at the Haymarket (now Her Majesty's Theatre), established in 1705 by architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, quickly became an opera house.[104] Between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 of Handel's operas premièred there.[105] In 1729 Handel became joint manager of the theatre with John James Heidegger.
+Handel travelled to Italy to engage new singers and also composed seven more operas, among them the comic masterpiece Partenope and the "magic" opera Orlando.[106] After two commercially successful English oratorios Esther and Deborah, he was able to invest again in the South Sea Company. Handel reworked his Acis and Galatea which then became his most successful work ever. Handel failed to compete with the Opera of the Nobility, who engaged musicians such as Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicolo Porpora and the famous castrato Farinelli. The strong support by Frederick, Prince of Wales caused conflicts in the royal family. In March 1734 Handel composed a wedding anthem This is the day which the Lord hath made, and a serenata Parnasso in Festa for Anne, Princess Royal.[107]
+Despite the problems the Opera of the Nobility was causing him at the time, Handel's neighbour in Brook Street, Mary Delany, reported on a party she invited Handel to at her house on 12 April 1734 where he was in good spirits:
+I had Lady Rich and her daughter, Lady Cath. Hanmer and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Percival, Sir John Stanley and my brother, Mrs. Donellan, Strada [star soprano of Handel's operas]  and Mr. Coot.  Lord Shaftesbury begged of Mr. Percival to bring him, and being a profess'd friend of Mr. Handel (who was here also) was admitted; I never was so well entertained at an opera!  Mr. Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o'clock till eleven.  I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine and biscuits.  Everybody was easy and seemed pleased.[108]
+In 1733 the Earl of Essex received a letter with the following sentence: "Handel became so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs." The board of chief investors expected Handel to retire when his contract ended, but Handel immediately looked for another theatre. In cooperation with John Rich he started his third company at Covent Garden Theatre. Rich was renowned for his spectacular productions. He suggested Handel use his small chorus and introduce the dancing of Marie Sallé, for whom Handel composed Terpsicore. In 1735 he introduced organ concertos between the acts. For the first time Handel allowed Gioacchino Conti, who had no time to learn his part, to substitute arias.[109] Financially, Ariodante was a failure, although he introduced ballet suites at the end of each act.[110] Alcina, his last opera with a magic content, and Alexander's Feast or the Power of Music based on John Dryden's Alexander's Feast starred Anna Maria Strada del Pò and John Beard.
+In April 1737, at age 52, Handel apparently suffered a stroke which disabled the use of four fingers on his right hand, preventing him from performing.[111] In summer the disorder seemed at times to affect his understanding. Nobody expected that Handel would ever be able to perform again. But whether the affliction was rheumatism, a stroke or a nervous breakdown, he recovered remarkably quickly .[112] To aid his recovery, Handel had travelled to Aachen, a spa in Germany. During six weeks he took long hot baths, and ended up playing the organ for a surprised audience.[113] He wrote  Faramondo in December 1737 and Serse in January 1738. Deidamia, his last opera, a co-production with the Earl of Holderness,[114] was performed three times in 1741. Handel gave up the opera business, while he enjoyed more success with his English oratorios.[115]
+In 1738 he composed music for a musical clock with a pipe organ built by Charles Clay; it was bought by Gerrit Braamcamp and was in 2016 acquired by the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht.[116][117]
+Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, an allegory, Handel's first oratorio[118] was composed in Italy in 1707, followed by La resurrezione in 1708 which uses material from the Bible. The circumstances of Esther and its first performance, possibly in 1718, are obscure.[119] Another 12 years had passed when an act of piracy caused him to take up Esther once again.[120] Three earlier performances aroused such interest that they naturally prompted the idea of introducing it to a larger public. Next came Deborah, strongly coloured by the coronation anthems[121] and Athaliah, his first English Oratorio.[122] In these three oratorios Handel laid the foundation for the traditional use of the chorus which marks his later oratorios.[123] Handel became sure of himself, broader in his presentation, and more diverse in his composition.[124]
+It is evident how much he learned from Arcangelo Corelli about writing for instruments, and from Alessandro Scarlatti about writing for the solo voice; but there is no single composer who taught him how to write for chorus.[125] Handel tended more and more to replace Italian soloists by English ones. The most significant reason for this change was the dwindling financial returns from his operas.[126] Thus a tradition was created for oratorios which was to govern their future performance. The performances were given without costumes and action; the singers appeared in their own clothes.[127]
+In 1736 Handel produced Alexander's Feast. John Beard appeared for the first time as one of Handel's principal singers and became Handel's permanent tenor soloist for the rest of Handel's life.[128] The piece was a great success and it encouraged Handel to make the transition from writing Italian operas to English choral works. In Saul, Handel was collaborating with Charles Jennens and experimenting with three trombones, a carillon and extra-large military kettledrums (from the Tower of London), to be sure "...it will be most excessive noisy".[129] Saul and Israel in Egypt both from 1739 head the list of great, mature oratorios, in which the da capo aria became the exception and not the rule.[130] Israel in Egypt consists of little else but choruses, borrowing from the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline. In his next works Handel changed his course. In these works he laid greater stress on the effects of orchestra and soloists; the chorus retired into the background.[131] L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has a rather diverting character; the work is light and fresh.
+During the summer of 1741, The 3rd Duke of Devonshire invited Handel to Dublin, capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, to give concerts for the benefit of local hospitals.[132] His Messiah was first performed at the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street on 13 April 1742, with 26 boys and five men from the combined choirs of St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals participating.[133] Handel secured a balance between soloists and chorus which he never surpassed.
+In 1747 Handel wrote his oratorio Alexander Balus. This work was produced at Covent Garden Theatre in London, on 23 March 1748, and to the aria Hark! hark! He strikes the golden lyre, Handel wrote the accompaniment for mandolin, harp, violin, viola, and violoncello.[134] Another of his English oratorios, Solomon, was first performed on 17 March 1749 at the Covent Garden Theatre.[135] Solomon contains a short and lively instrumental passage for two oboes and strings in act 3, known as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba".
+The use of English soloists reached its height at the first performance of Samson. The work is highly theatrical. The role of the chorus became increasingly important in his later oratorios. Jephtha was first performed on 26 February 1752; even though it was his last oratorio, it was no less a masterpiece than his earlier works.[136]
+In 1749 Handel composed Music for the Royal Fireworks; 12,000 people attended the first performance.[137] In 1750 he arranged a performance of Messiah to benefit the Foundling Hospital. The performance was considered a great success and was followed by annual concerts that continued throughout his life. In recognition of his patronage, Handel was made a governor of the Hospital the day after his initial concert. He bequeathed a copy of Messiah to the institution upon his death.[138] His involvement with the Foundling Hospital is today commemorated with a permanent exhibition in London's Foundling Museum, which also holds the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. In addition to the Foundling Hospital, Handel also gave to a charity that assisted impoverished musicians and their families.
+In August 1750, on a journey back from Germany to London, Handel was seriously injured in a carriage accident between The Hague and Haarlem in the Netherlands.[139] In 1751 one eye started to fail. The cause was a cataract which was operated on by the great charlatan Chevalier Taylor. This did not improve his eyesight, but possibly made it worse.[115] He was completely blind by 1752. He died in 1759 at home in Brook Street, at age 74. The last performance he attended was of Messiah. Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.[140] More than three thousand mourners attended his funeral, which was given full state honours.
+Handel never married, and kept his personal life private. His initial will bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his niece Johanna, however four codicils distributed much of his estate to other relations, servants, friends and charities.[141]
+Handel owned an art collection that was auctioned posthumously in 1760.[142] The auction catalogue listed approximately seventy paintings and ten prints (other paintings were bequeathed).[142]
+Handel's compositions include 42 operas, 25 oratorios, more than 120 cantatas, trios and duets, numerous arias, chamber music, a large number of ecumenical pieces, odes and serenatas, 18 concerti grossi and 12 organ concertos. His most famous work, the oratorio Messiah with its "Hallelujah" chorus, is among the most popular works in choral music and has become the centrepiece of the Christmas season. The Lobkowicz Palace in Prague holds Mozart's copy of Messiah, complete with handwritten annotations. Among the works with opus numbers published and popularised in his lifetime are the Organ concertos Op. 4 and Op. 7, together with the Opus 3 and Opus 6 Concerti grossi; the latter incorporate an earlier organ concerto The Cuckoo and the Nightingale in which birdsong is imitated in the upper registers of the organ. Also notable are his 16 keyboard suites, especially The Harmonious Blacksmith.
+Handel introduced previously uncommon musical instruments in his works: the viola d'amore and violetta marina (Orlando), the lute (Ode for St. Cecilia's Day), three trombones (Saul), clarinets or small high cornetts (Tamerlano), theorbo, French horn (Water Music), lyrichord, double bassoon, viola da gamba, carillon (bell chimes), positive organ, and harp (Giulio Cesare, Alexander's Feast).[143]
+The first published catalogue of Handel's works appeared as an appendix to Mainwaring's Memoirs.[144] Between 1787 and 1797 Samuel Arnold compiled a 180-volume collection of Handel's works—however, it was far from complete.[145] Also incomplete was the collection produced between 1843 and 1858 by the English Handel Society (founded by Sir George Macfarren).[146]
+The 105-volume Händel-Gesellschaft ("Handel Society") edition was published between 1858 and 1902 – mainly due to the efforts of Friedrich Chrysander. For modern performance, the realisation of the basso continuo reflects 19th century practice. Vocal scores drawn from the edition were published by Novello in London, but some scores, such as the vocal score to Samson, are incomplete.
+The continuing Hallische Händel-Ausgabe edition was first inaugurated in 1955 in the Halle region in Saxony-Anhalt, Eastern Germany. It did not start as a critical edition, but after heavy criticism of the first volumes, which were performing editions without a critical apparatus (for example, the opera Serse was published with the title character recast as a tenor, reflecting pre-war German practice), it repositioned itself as a critical edition. Influenced in part by cold-war realities, editorial work was inconsistent: misprints are found in abundance and editors failed to consult important sources. In 1985 a committee was formed to establish better standards for the edition. The unification of Germany in 1990 removed communication problems, and the volumes issued have since shown a significant improvement in standards.[115]
+Between 1978 and 1986 the German academic Bernd Baselt catalogued Handel's works in his Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis publication. The catalogue has achieved wide acceptance and is used as the modern numbering system, with each of Handel's works designated an "HWV" number, for example Messiah is catalogued as "HWV 56".
+Handel's works were collected and preserved by two men: Sir Samuel Hellier, a country squire whose musical acquisitions form the nucleus of the Shaw-Hellier Collection,[147] and the abolitionist Granville Sharp.[148] The catalogue accompanying the National Portrait Gallery exhibition marking the tercentenary of the composer's birth calls them two men of the late eighteenth century "who have left us solid evidence of the means by which they indulged their enthusiasm".[149] With his English oratorios, such as Messiah and Solomon, the coronation anthems, and other works including Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, Handel became a national icon in Britain, and featured in the BBC series, The Birth of British Music: Handel – The Conquering Hero.[150]
+After his death, Handel's Italian operas fell into obscurity, except for selections such as the aria from Serse, "Ombra mai fu". The oratorios continued to be performed but not long after Handel's death they were thought to need some modernisation, and Mozart orchestrated German versions of Messiah and other works. Throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, particularly in the Anglophone countries, his reputation rested primarily on his English oratorios, which were customarily performed by choruses of amateur singers on solemn occasions.  The centenary of his death, in 1859, was celebrated by a performance of Messiah at The Crystal Palace, involving 2,765 singers and 460 instrumentalists, who played for an audience of about 10,000 people.[151]
+Recent decades have revived his secular cantatas and what one might call 'secular oratorios' or 'concert operas'. Of the former, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (1739) (set to texts by John Dryden) and Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne (1713) are noteworthy. For his secular oratorios, Handel turned to classical mythology for subjects, producing such works as Acis and Galatea (1719), Hercules (1745) and Semele (1744). These works have a close kinship with the sacred oratorios, particularly in the vocal writing for the English-language texts. They also share the lyrical and dramatic qualities of Handel's Italian operas. As such, they are sometimes fully staged as operas. With the rediscovery of his theatrical works, Handel, in addition to his renown as instrumentalist, orchestral writer, and melodist, is now perceived as being one of opera's great musical dramatists.
+The original form of his name, Georg Friedrich Händel, is generally used in Germany and elsewhere, but he is known as "Haendel" in France. A different composer, Jacob Handl or Händl (1550–1591) is usually known by the Latin form Jacobus Gallus that appears in his publications.
+Handel has generally been accorded high esteem by fellow composers, both in his own time and since.[152] Johann Sebastian Bach  attempted, unsuccessfully, to meet Handel while he was visiting Halle.[153] (Handel was born in the same year as Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.) Mozart is reputed to have said of him, "Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt."[154] To Beethoven he was "the master of us all... the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb."[154] Beethoven emphasised above all the simplicity and popular appeal of Handel's music when he said, "Go to him to learn how to achieve great effects, by such simple means."
+Since 1831, when William Crotch raised the issue in his Substance of Several Lectures on Music, scholars have extensively studied Handel's "borrowing" of music from other composers. Summarising the field in 2005, Richard Taruskin wrote that Handel "seems to have been the champion of all parodists, adapting both his own works and those of other composers in unparalleled numbers and with unparalleled exactitude."[155] Among the composers whose music has been shown to have been re-used by Handel are Alessandro Stradella, Gottlieb Muffat, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti[156] Giacomo Carissimi, Georg Philipp Telemann, Carl Heinrich Graun, Leonardo Vinci, Jacobus Gallus, Francesco Antonio Urio, Reinhard Keiser, Francesco Gasparini, Giovanni Bononcini, William Boyce, Henry Lawes, Michael Wise, Agostino Steffani, Franz Johann Habermann, and numerous others.[157]
+In an essay published in 1985, John H. Roberts demonstrated that Handel's borrowings were unusually frequent even for his own era, enough to have been criticised by contemporaries (notably Johann Mattheson); Roberts suggested several reasons for Handel's practice, including Handel's attempts to make certain works sound more up-to-date and more radically, his "basic lack of facility in inventing original ideas" – though Roberts took care to argue that this does not "diminish Handel's stature", which should be "judged not by his methods, still less by his motives in employing them, but solely by the effects he achieves."[158]
+After Handel's death, many composers wrote works based on or inspired by his music. The first movement from Louis Spohr's Symphony No. 6, Op. 116, "The Age of Bach and Handel", resembles two melodies from Handel's Messiah. In 1797 Ludwig van Beethoven published the 12 Variations in G major on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ from Judas Maccabaeus by Handel, for cello and piano. In 1822 Beethoven composed The Consecration of the House overture, which also bears the influence of Handel. Guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel, Op. 107 for guitar, based on Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major, HWV 430, for harpsichord.
+In 1861, using a theme from the second of Handel's harpsichord suites, Johannes Brahms wrote the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24, one of his most successful works (praised by Richard Wagner).  Several works by the French composer Félix-Alexandre Guilmant use Handel's themes, for example his March on a Theme by Handel uses a theme from Messiah. French composer and flautist Philippe Gaubert wrote his Petite marche for flute and piano based on the fourth movement of Handel's Trio Sonata, Op. 5, No. 2, HWV 397. Argentine composer Luis Gianneo composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel for piano. In 1911, Australian-born composer and pianist Percy Grainger based one of his most famous works on the final movement of Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major (just like Giuliani). He first wrote some variations on the theme, which he titled Variations on Handel's 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' . Then he used the first sixteen bars of his set of variations to create Handel in the Strand, one of his most beloved pieces, of which he made several versions (for example, the piano solo version from 1930). Arnold Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B-flat major (1933) was composed after Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6/7.[159]
+Handel is honoured with a feast day on 28 July in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church, with Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell. In the Lutheran Calendar of Saints Handel and Bach share that date with Heinrich Schütz, and Handel and Bach are commemorated in the calendar of saints prepared by the Order of Saint Luke for the use of the United Methodist Church.[160] The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (Westminster John Knox Press, 2018) commemorates him on April 20.
+In 1942, Handel was the subject of the British biopic The Great Mr. Handel directed by Norman Walker and starring Wilfrid Lawson. It was made at Denham Studios by the Rank Organisation, and shot in Technicolor. He is also the central character in the television films God Rot Tunbridge Wells! (1985) and Handel's Last Chance (1996) and the stage play All the Angels (2015). Handel was portrayed by Jeroen Krabbé as the antagonist in the film Farinelli (1994).

en/2186.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@

+George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (/ˈhændəl/;[a] born Georg Friederich Händel[b] [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhɛndl̩] (listen); 23 February 1685 (O.S.) [(N.S.) 5 March] – 14 April 1759)[2][c] was a German, later British, Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi and organ concertos. Handel received important training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in 1727.[5] He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition. He would become a huge influence on classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven.
+Within fifteen years, Handel had started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. Musicologist Winton Dean writes that his operas show that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order."[6] As Alexander's Feast (1736) was well received, Handel made a transition to English choral works. After his success with Messiah (1742) he never composed an Italian opera again. Almost blind, and having lived in England for nearly fifty years, he died in 1759, a respected and rich man. His funeral was given full state honours, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
+Handel is regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era, with works such as Messiah, Water Music, and Music for the Royal Fireworks remaining steadfastly popular.[7] One of his four coronation anthems, Zadok the Priest (1727), composed for the coronation of George II, has been performed at every subsequent British coronation, traditionally during the sovereign's anointing. Another of his English oratorios, Solomon (1748), has also remained popular, with the Sinfonia that opens act 3 (known more commonly as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba") featuring at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. Handel composed more than forty opera serias in over thirty years, and since the late 1960s, with the revival of baroque music and historically informed musical performance, interest in Handel's operas has grown.
+Handel was born in 1685 in Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg (then part of Brandenburg-Prussia), to Georg Händel and Dorothea Taust.[8] His father, aged sixty-three when George Frideric was born, was an eminent barber-surgeon who served the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and the Margraviate of Brandenburg.[9]
+Georg Händel (senior) was the son of a coppersmith, Valentin Händel (1582–1636), who had emigrated from Eisleben in 1608 with his first wife Anna Belching, the daughter of a master coppersmith. They were Protestants and chose reliably Protestant Saxony over Silesia, a Habsburg possession, as religious tensions mounted in the years before the Thirty Years War.[10] Halle was a relatively prosperous city, home of a salt-mining industry and center of trade (and member of the Hanseatic League).[11] The Margrave of Brandenburg became the administrator of the archiepiscopal territories of Mainz, including Magdeburg when they converted, and by the early 17th century held his court in Halle, which attracted renowned musicians.[d] Even the smaller churches all had "able organists and fair choirs",[e] and humanities and the letters thrived (Shakespeare was performed in the theaters early in the 17th century).[13] The Thirty Years War brought extensive destruction to Halle, and by the 1680s it was impoverished.[10] However, since the middle of the war the city had been under the administration of the Duke of Saxony, and soon after the end of the war he would bring musicians trained in Dresden to his court in Weissenfels.[14]
+The arts and music, however, flourished only among the higher strata (not only in Halle but throughout Germany),[15] of which Handel's family was not a member. Georg Händel (senior) was born at the beginning of the war, and was apprenticed to a barber in Halle at the age of 14, after his father died.[f] When he was 20, he married the widow of the official barber-surgeon of a suburb of Halle, inheriting his practice. With this, Georg determinedly began the process of becoming self-made; by dint of his "conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous" lifestyle,[16] he guided the five children he had with Anna who reached adulthood into the medical profession (except his youngest daughter, who married a government official).[17] Anna died in 1682. Within a year Georg married again, this time to the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Pastor Georg Taust of the Church of St. Bartholomew in Giebichenstein,[18] who himself came from a long line of Lutheran pastors.[16] Handel was the second child of this marriage; the first son was stillborn.[19] Two younger sisters were born after the birth of George Frideric: Dorthea Sophia, born 6 October 1687, and Johanna Christiana, born 10 January 1690.[20]
+Early in his life Handel is reported to have attended the Gymnasium in Halle,[21] where the headmaster, Johann Praetorius [de], was reputed to be an ardent musician.[22] Whether Handel remained there, and if he did for how long, is unknown, but many biographers suggest that he was withdrawn from school by his father, based on the characterization of him by Handel's first biographer, John Mainwaring. Mainwaring is the source for almost all information (little as it is) of Handel's childhood, and much of that information came from J.C. Smith, Jr., Handel's confidant and copyist.[23] Whether it came from Smith or elsewhere, Mainwaring frequently relates misinformation.[g] It is from Mainwaring that the portrait comes of Handel's father as implacably opposed to any musical education. Mainwaring writes that Georg Händel was "alarmed" at Handel's very early propensity for music,[h] "took every measure to oppose it", including forbidding any musical instrument in the house and preventing Handel from going to any house where they might be found.[25] This did nothing to dampen young Handel's inclination; in fact, it did the reverse. Mainwaring tells the story of Handel's secret attic spinet: Handel "found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep".[26] Although both John Hawkins and Charles Burney credited this tale, Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible" and a feat of "poetic imagination"[27] and Lang considers it one of the unproven "romantic stories" that surrounded Handel's childhood.[28] But Handel had to have had some experience with the keyboard to have made the impression in Weissenfels that resulted in his receiving formal musical training.[29]
+Sometime between the ages of seven and nine, Handel accompanied his father to Weissenfels where he came under the notice of one whom Handel thereafter always regarded throughout life as his benefactor,[30] Duke Johann Adolf I.[i] Somehow Handel made his way to the court organ in the palace chapel of the Holy Trinity, where he surprised everyone with his playing.[33] Overhearing this performance and noting the youth of the performer caused the Duke, whose suggestions were not to be disregarded, to recommend to Georg Händel that Handel be given musical instruction.[34] Handel's father engaged the organist at the Halle parish church, the young Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, to instruct Handel. Zachow would be the only teacher that Handel ever had.[28] Because of his church employment, Zachow was an organist "of the old school", reveling in fugues, canons and counterpoint.[30] But he was also familiar with developments in music across Europe and his own compositions "embraced the new concerted, dramatic style".[j] When Zachow discovered the talent of Handel, he introduced him "to a vast collection of German and Italian music, which he possessed, sacred and profane, vocal and instrumental compositions of different schools, different styles, and of every master".[30] Many traits considered "Handelian" can be traced back to Zachow's music.[36] At the same time Handel continued practice on the harpsichord, learned violin and organ, but according to Burney his special affection was for the hautbois (oboe).[37] Schoelcher speculates that his youthful devotion to the instrument explains the large number of pieces he composed for oboe.[38]
+With respect to instruction in composition, in addition to having Handel apply himself to traditional fugue and cantus firmus work, Zachow, recognizing Handel's precocious talents, systematically introduced Handel to the variety of styles and masterworks contained in his extensive library. He did this by requiring Handel to copy selected scores. "I used to write like the devil in those days", Handel recalled much later.[39] Much of this copying was entered into a notebook that Handel maintained for the rest of his life. Although it has since disappeared, the notebook has been sufficiently described to understand what pieces Zachow wished Handel to study. Among the chief composers represented in this exercise book were Johann Krieger, an "old master" in the fugue and prominent organ composer, Johann Caspar Kerll, a representative of the "southern style" after his teacher Frescobaldi and imitated later by Handel,[k] Johann Jakob Froberger, an "internationalist" also closely studied by Buxtehude and Bach, and Georg Muffat, whose amalgam of French and Italian styles and his synthesis of musical forms influenced Handel.[41]
+Mainwaring writes that during this time Zachow had begun to have Handel assume some of his church duties. Zachow, Mainwaring asserts, was "often" absent, "from his love of company, and a chearful glass", and Handel therefore performed on organ frequently.[42] What is more, according to Mainwaring, Handel began composing, at the age of nine, church services for voice and instruments "and from that time actually did compose a service every week for three years successively."[43] Mainwaring ends this chapter of Handel's life by concluding that three or four years had been enough to allow Handel to surpass Zachow, and Handel had become "impatient for another situation"; "Berlin was the place agreed upon."[44] Carelessness with dates or sequences (and possibly imaginative interpretation by Mainwaring) makes this period confused.[l]
+Handel's father died on 11 February 1697.[45] It was German custom for friends and family to compose funeral odes for a substantial burgher like Georg,[46] and young Handel discharged his duty with a poem dated 18 February and signed with his name and (in deference to his father's wishes) "dedicated to the liberal arts."[47] At the time Handel was studying either at Halle's Lutheran Gymnasium or the Latin School.[46]
+Mainwaring has Handel traveling to Berlin the next year, 1698.[44] The problem with Mainwaring as an authority for this date, however, is that he tells of how Handel's father communicated with the "king"[m] during Handel's stay, declining the Court's offer to send Handel to Italy on a stipend[49] and that his father died "after his return from Berlin."[50] But since Georg Händel died in 1697, either the date of the trip or Mainwaring's statements about Handel's father must be in error. Early biographers solved the problem by making the year of the trip 1696, then noting that at the age of 11 Handel would need a guardian, so they have Handel's father or a friend of the family accompany him, all the while puzzling over why the elder Handel, who wanted Handel to become a lawyer, would spend the sum to lead his son further into the temptation of music as a career.[51] Schoelcher for example has Handel traveling to Berlin at 11, meeting both Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti in Berlin and then returning at the direction of his father.[52] But Ariosti was not in Berlin before the death of Handel's father,[53] and Handel could not have met Bononcini in Berlin before 1702.[54] Modern biographers either accept the year as 1698, since most reliable older authorities agree with it,[n] and discount what Mainwaring says about what took place during the trip or assume that Mainwaring conflated two or more visits to Berlin, as he did with Handel's later trips to Venice.[55]
+Perhaps to fulfill a promise to his father or simply because he saw himself as "dedicated to the liberal arts," on 10 February 1702 Handel matriculated at the University of Halle.[56] That university had only recently been founded. In 1694 the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III (later Prussian King Frederick I) created the school, largely to provide a lecture forum for the jurist Christian Thomasius who had been expelled from Leipzig for his liberal views.[13] Händel did not enroll in the faculty of law, although he almost certainly attended lectures.[57] Thomasius was an intellectual and academic crusader who was the first German academic to lecture in German and also denounced witch trials. Lang believes that Thomasius instilled in Händel a "respect for the dignity and freedom of man's mind and the solemn majesty of the law," principles that would have drawn him to and kept him in England for half a century.[58] Handel also there encountered theologian and professor of Oriental languages August Hermann Francke, who was particularly solicitous of children, particularly orphans. The orphanage he founded became a model for Germany, and undoubtedly influenced Handel's own charitable impulse, when he assigned the rights of Messiah to London's Foundling Hospital.[59]
+Shortly after commencing his university education, Handel (though Lutheran[o]) on 13 March 1702 accepted the position of organist at the Calvinist Cathedral in Halle, the Domkirche, replacing J.C. Leporin, for whom he had acted as assistant.[61] The position, which was a one-year probationary appointment showed the foundation he had received from Zachow, for a church organist and cantor was a highly prestigious office. From it he received 5 thalers a year and lodgings in the run-down castle of Moritzburg. [62]
+Around this same time Handel made the acquaintance of Telemann. Four years Handel's senior, Telemann was studying law and assisting cantor Johann Kuhnau (Bach's predecessor at the Thomaskirche there). Telemann recalled forty years later in an autobiography for Mattheson's Grundlage: "The writing of the excellent Johann Kuhnau served as a model for me in fugue and counterpoint; but in fashioning melodic movements and examining them Handel and I were constantly occupied, frequently visiting each other as well as writing letters."[63]
+Although Mainwaring records that Handel wrote weekly when assistant to Zachow and as probationary organist at Domkirche part of his duty was to provide suitable music,[p] no sacred compositions from his Halle period can now be identified.[65] Mattheson, however, summarized his opinion of Handel's church cantatas written in Halle: "Handel in those days set very, very long arias and sheerly unending cantatas which, while not possessing the proper knack or correct taste, were perfect so far as harmony is concerned."[66]
+Early chamber works do exist, but it is difficult to date any of them to Handel's time in Halle. Many historians until recently followed Chrysander and designated the six trio sonatas for two oboes and basso continuo as his first known composition, supposedly written in 1696 (when Handel was 11).[67] Lang doubts the dating based on a handwritten date of a copy (1700) and stylistic considerations. Lang writes that the works "show thorough acquaintance with the distilled sonata style of the Corelli school" and are notable for "the formal security and the cleanness of the texture."[68] Hogwood considers all of the oboe trio sonatas spurious and even suggests that some parts cannot be performed on oboe.[69]  That authentic manuscript sources do not exist and that Handel never recycled any material from these works make their authenticity doubtful.[70] Other early chamber works were printed in Amsterdam in 1724 as opus 1, but it is impossible to tell which are early works in their original form, rather than later re-workings by Handel, a frequent practice of his.[68]
+Handel's probationary appointment to Domkirche expired in March 1703. By July[q] Handel was in Hamburg. Since he left no explanation for the move[r] biographers have offered their own speculation. Burrows believes that the answer can be found by untangling Mainwaring's confused chronology of the trip to Berlin. Burrows dates this trip to 1702 or 1703 (after his father's death) and concluded that since Handel (through a "friend and relation" at the Berlin court) turned down Frederick's offer to subsidize his musical education in Italy (with the implicit understanding that he would become a court musician on his return), Handel was no longer able to expect preferment (whether as musician, lawyer or otherwise) within Brandenburg-Prussia. And since he was attracted to secular, dramatic music (by meeting the Italians Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti and through the influence of Telemann), Hamburg, a free city with an established opera company, was the logical choice.[74] The question remains, however, why Handel rejected the King's offer, given that Italy was the center of opera. Lang suggests that, influenced by the teachings of Thomasius, Handel's character was such that he was unable to make himself subservient to anyone, even a king. Lang sees Handel as someone who could not accept class distinctions that required him to regard himself as a social inferior. "What Handel craved was personal freedom to raise himself out of his provincial milieu to a life of culture."[75] Burrows notes that like his father, Handel was able to accept royal (and aristocratic) favors without considering himself a court servant.[76] And so given the embarrassed financial condition of his mother,[50] Handel set off for Hamburg to obtain experience while supporting himself.
+In 1703 he accepted a position as violinist and harpsichordist in the orchestra of the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt.[77] There he met the composers Johann Mattheson, Christoph Graupner and Reinhard Keiser. His first two operas, Almira and Nero, were produced in 1705.[78] He produced two other operas, Daphne and Florindo, in 1708. It is unclear whether Handel directed these performances.
+According to Mainwaring, in 1706 Handel travelled to Italy at the invitation of Ferdinando de' Medici. Other sources say Handel was invited by Gian Gastone de' Medici, whom Handel had met in 1703–1704 in Hamburg.[79] De' Medici[which?], who had a keen interest in opera, was trying to make Florence Italy's musical capital by attracting the leading talents of his day. In Italy Handel met librettist Antonio Salvi, with whom he later collaborated. Handel left for Rome and, since opera was (temporarily) banned in the Papal States, composed sacred music for the Roman clergy. His famous Dixit Dominus (1707) is from this era. He also composed cantatas in pastoral style for musical gatherings in the palaces of duchess Aurora Sanseverino (whom Mainwaring called "Donna Laura")[80] one of the most influential patrons from the Kingdom of Naples, and cardinals Pietro Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphili and Carlo Colonna. Two oratorios, La resurrezione and Il trionfo del tempo, were produced in a private setting for Ruspoli and Ottoboni in 1709 and 1710, respectively. Rodrigo, his first all-Italian opera, was produced in the Cocomero theatre in Florence in 1707.[81] Agrippina was first produced in 1709 at Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice, owned by the Grimanis. The opera, with a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, ran for 27 nights successively.[82] The audience, thunderstruck with the grandeur and sublimity of his style,[83] applauded for Il caro Sassone ("the dear Saxon" – referring to Handel's German origins).
+In 1710, Handel became Kapellmeister to German prince George, the Elector of Hanover, who in 1714 would become King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.[84] He visited Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici and her husband in Düsseldorf on his way to London in 1710. With his opera Rinaldo, based on La Gerusalemme Liberata by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, Handel enjoyed great success, although it was composed quickly, with many borrowings from his older Italian works.[85] This work contains one of Handel's favourite arias, Cara sposa, amante cara, and the famous Lascia ch'io pianga.
+In 1712, Handel decided to settle permanently in England. In the summer of 1713 he lived at Mr Mathew Andrews' estate in Barn Elms, Surrey.[86][87] He received a yearly income of £200 from Queen Anne after composing for her the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, first performed in 1713.[88][89]
+One of his most important patrons was The 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, a young and extremely wealthy member of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family.[90] While living in the mansion of Lord Burlington, Handel wrote Amadigi di Gaula, a "magic" opera, about a damsel in distress, based on the tragedy by Antoine Houdar de la Motte.
+The conception of an opera as a coherent structure was slow to capture Handel's imagination[91] and he composed no operas for five years. In July 1717 Handel's Water Music was performed more than three times on the River Thames for the King and his guests. It is said the compositions spurred reconciliation between Handel and the King, supposedly annoyed by the composer's abandonment of his Hanover post.[92]
+In 1717 Handel became house composer at Cannons in Middlesex, where he laid the cornerstone for his future choral compositions in the Chandos Anthems.[93] Romain Rolland wrote that these anthems (or Psalms) stood in relation to Handel's oratorios, much the same way that the Italian cantatas stood to his operas: "splendid sketches of the more monumental works."[94] Another work, which he wrote for The 1st Duke of Chandos, the owner of Cannons, was Acis and Galatea: during Handel's lifetime it was his most performed work. Winton Dean wrote, "the music catches breath and disturbs the memory".[95]
+In 1719 the Duke of Chandos became one of the composer's important patrons and main subscribers to his new opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, but his patronage declined after Chandos lost money in the South Sea bubble, which burst in 1720 in one of history's greatest financial cataclysms. Handel himself invested in South Sea stock in 1716, when prices were low[96] and sold before 1720.[97]
+In May 1719, The 1st Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chamberlain, ordered Handel to look for new singers.[98] Handel travelled to Dresden to attend the newly built opera. He saw Teofane by Antonio Lotti, and engaged members of the cast for the Royal Academy of Music, founded by a group of aristocrats to assure themselves a constant supply of baroque opera or opera seria. Handel may have invited John Smith, his fellow student in Halle, and his son Johann Christoph Schmidt, to become his secretary and amanuensis.[99] By 1723 he had moved into a Georgian house at 25 Brook Street, which he rented for the rest of his life.[100] This house, where he rehearsed, copied music and sold tickets, is now the Handel House Museum.[s] During twelve months between 1724 and 1725, Handel wrote three outstanding and successful operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Handel's operas are filled with da capo arias, such as Svegliatevi nel core. After composing Silete venti, he concentrated on opera and stopped writing cantatas. Scipio, from which the regimental slow march of the British Grenadier Guards is derived,[101] was performed as a stopgap, waiting for the arrival of Faustina Bordoni.
+In 1727 Handel was commissioned to write four anthems for the Coronation ceremony of King George II. One of these, Zadok the Priest, has been played at every British coronation ceremony since.[102] In 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which made fun of the type of Italian opera Handel had popularised in London, premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time.[103] After nine years the Royal Academy of Music ceased to function but Handel soon started a new company.
+The Queen's Theatre at the Haymarket (now Her Majesty's Theatre), established in 1705 by architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, quickly became an opera house.[104] Between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 of Handel's operas premièred there.[105] In 1729 Handel became joint manager of the theatre with John James Heidegger.
+Handel travelled to Italy to engage new singers and also composed seven more operas, among them the comic masterpiece Partenope and the "magic" opera Orlando.[106] After two commercially successful English oratorios Esther and Deborah, he was able to invest again in the South Sea Company. Handel reworked his Acis and Galatea which then became his most successful work ever. Handel failed to compete with the Opera of the Nobility, who engaged musicians such as Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicolo Porpora and the famous castrato Farinelli. The strong support by Frederick, Prince of Wales caused conflicts in the royal family. In March 1734 Handel composed a wedding anthem This is the day which the Lord hath made, and a serenata Parnasso in Festa for Anne, Princess Royal.[107]
+Despite the problems the Opera of the Nobility was causing him at the time, Handel's neighbour in Brook Street, Mary Delany, reported on a party she invited Handel to at her house on 12 April 1734 where he was in good spirits:
+I had Lady Rich and her daughter, Lady Cath. Hanmer and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Percival, Sir John Stanley and my brother, Mrs. Donellan, Strada [star soprano of Handel's operas]  and Mr. Coot.  Lord Shaftesbury begged of Mr. Percival to bring him, and being a profess'd friend of Mr. Handel (who was here also) was admitted; I never was so well entertained at an opera!  Mr. Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o'clock till eleven.  I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine and biscuits.  Everybody was easy and seemed pleased.[108]
+In 1733 the Earl of Essex received a letter with the following sentence: "Handel became so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs." The board of chief investors expected Handel to retire when his contract ended, but Handel immediately looked for another theatre. In cooperation with John Rich he started his third company at Covent Garden Theatre. Rich was renowned for his spectacular productions. He suggested Handel use his small chorus and introduce the dancing of Marie Sallé, for whom Handel composed Terpsicore. In 1735 he introduced organ concertos between the acts. For the first time Handel allowed Gioacchino Conti, who had no time to learn his part, to substitute arias.[109] Financially, Ariodante was a failure, although he introduced ballet suites at the end of each act.[110] Alcina, his last opera with a magic content, and Alexander's Feast or the Power of Music based on John Dryden's Alexander's Feast starred Anna Maria Strada del Pò and John Beard.
+In April 1737, at age 52, Handel apparently suffered a stroke which disabled the use of four fingers on his right hand, preventing him from performing.[111] In summer the disorder seemed at times to affect his understanding. Nobody expected that Handel would ever be able to perform again. But whether the affliction was rheumatism, a stroke or a nervous breakdown, he recovered remarkably quickly .[112] To aid his recovery, Handel had travelled to Aachen, a spa in Germany. During six weeks he took long hot baths, and ended up playing the organ for a surprised audience.[113] He wrote  Faramondo in December 1737 and Serse in January 1738. Deidamia, his last opera, a co-production with the Earl of Holderness,[114] was performed three times in 1741. Handel gave up the opera business, while he enjoyed more success with his English oratorios.[115]
+In 1738 he composed music for a musical clock with a pipe organ built by Charles Clay; it was bought by Gerrit Braamcamp and was in 2016 acquired by the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht.[116][117]
+Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, an allegory, Handel's first oratorio[118] was composed in Italy in 1707, followed by La resurrezione in 1708 which uses material from the Bible. The circumstances of Esther and its first performance, possibly in 1718, are obscure.[119] Another 12 years had passed when an act of piracy caused him to take up Esther once again.[120] Three earlier performances aroused such interest that they naturally prompted the idea of introducing it to a larger public. Next came Deborah, strongly coloured by the coronation anthems[121] and Athaliah, his first English Oratorio.[122] In these three oratorios Handel laid the foundation for the traditional use of the chorus which marks his later oratorios.[123] Handel became sure of himself, broader in his presentation, and more diverse in his composition.[124]
+It is evident how much he learned from Arcangelo Corelli about writing for instruments, and from Alessandro Scarlatti about writing for the solo voice; but there is no single composer who taught him how to write for chorus.[125] Handel tended more and more to replace Italian soloists by English ones. The most significant reason for this change was the dwindling financial returns from his operas.[126] Thus a tradition was created for oratorios which was to govern their future performance. The performances were given without costumes and action; the singers appeared in their own clothes.[127]
+In 1736 Handel produced Alexander's Feast. John Beard appeared for the first time as one of Handel's principal singers and became Handel's permanent tenor soloist for the rest of Handel's life.[128] The piece was a great success and it encouraged Handel to make the transition from writing Italian operas to English choral works. In Saul, Handel was collaborating with Charles Jennens and experimenting with three trombones, a carillon and extra-large military kettledrums (from the Tower of London), to be sure "...it will be most excessive noisy".[129] Saul and Israel in Egypt both from 1739 head the list of great, mature oratorios, in which the da capo aria became the exception and not the rule.[130] Israel in Egypt consists of little else but choruses, borrowing from the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline. In his next works Handel changed his course. In these works he laid greater stress on the effects of orchestra and soloists; the chorus retired into the background.[131] L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has a rather diverting character; the work is light and fresh.
+During the summer of 1741, The 3rd Duke of Devonshire invited Handel to Dublin, capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, to give concerts for the benefit of local hospitals.[132] His Messiah was first performed at the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street on 13 April 1742, with 26 boys and five men from the combined choirs of St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals participating.[133] Handel secured a balance between soloists and chorus which he never surpassed.
+In 1747 Handel wrote his oratorio Alexander Balus. This work was produced at Covent Garden Theatre in London, on 23 March 1748, and to the aria Hark! hark! He strikes the golden lyre, Handel wrote the accompaniment for mandolin, harp, violin, viola, and violoncello.[134] Another of his English oratorios, Solomon, was first performed on 17 March 1749 at the Covent Garden Theatre.[135] Solomon contains a short and lively instrumental passage for two oboes and strings in act 3, known as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba".
+The use of English soloists reached its height at the first performance of Samson. The work is highly theatrical. The role of the chorus became increasingly important in his later oratorios. Jephtha was first performed on 26 February 1752; even though it was his last oratorio, it was no less a masterpiece than his earlier works.[136]
+In 1749 Handel composed Music for the Royal Fireworks; 12,000 people attended the first performance.[137] In 1750 he arranged a performance of Messiah to benefit the Foundling Hospital. The performance was considered a great success and was followed by annual concerts that continued throughout his life. In recognition of his patronage, Handel was made a governor of the Hospital the day after his initial concert. He bequeathed a copy of Messiah to the institution upon his death.[138] His involvement with the Foundling Hospital is today commemorated with a permanent exhibition in London's Foundling Museum, which also holds the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. In addition to the Foundling Hospital, Handel also gave to a charity that assisted impoverished musicians and their families.
+In August 1750, on a journey back from Germany to London, Handel was seriously injured in a carriage accident between The Hague and Haarlem in the Netherlands.[139] In 1751 one eye started to fail. The cause was a cataract which was operated on by the great charlatan Chevalier Taylor. This did not improve his eyesight, but possibly made it worse.[115] He was completely blind by 1752. He died in 1759 at home in Brook Street, at age 74. The last performance he attended was of Messiah. Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.[140] More than three thousand mourners attended his funeral, which was given full state honours.
+Handel never married, and kept his personal life private. His initial will bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his niece Johanna, however four codicils distributed much of his estate to other relations, servants, friends and charities.[141]
+Handel owned an art collection that was auctioned posthumously in 1760.[142] The auction catalogue listed approximately seventy paintings and ten prints (other paintings were bequeathed).[142]
+Handel's compositions include 42 operas, 25 oratorios, more than 120 cantatas, trios and duets, numerous arias, chamber music, a large number of ecumenical pieces, odes and serenatas, 18 concerti grossi and 12 organ concertos. His most famous work, the oratorio Messiah with its "Hallelujah" chorus, is among the most popular works in choral music and has become the centrepiece of the Christmas season. The Lobkowicz Palace in Prague holds Mozart's copy of Messiah, complete with handwritten annotations. Among the works with opus numbers published and popularised in his lifetime are the Organ concertos Op. 4 and Op. 7, together with the Opus 3 and Opus 6 Concerti grossi; the latter incorporate an earlier organ concerto The Cuckoo and the Nightingale in which birdsong is imitated in the upper registers of the organ. Also notable are his 16 keyboard suites, especially The Harmonious Blacksmith.
+Handel introduced previously uncommon musical instruments in his works: the viola d'amore and violetta marina (Orlando), the lute (Ode for St. Cecilia's Day), three trombones (Saul), clarinets or small high cornetts (Tamerlano), theorbo, French horn (Water Music), lyrichord, double bassoon, viola da gamba, carillon (bell chimes), positive organ, and harp (Giulio Cesare, Alexander's Feast).[143]
+The first published catalogue of Handel's works appeared as an appendix to Mainwaring's Memoirs.[144] Between 1787 and 1797 Samuel Arnold compiled a 180-volume collection of Handel's works—however, it was far from complete.[145] Also incomplete was the collection produced between 1843 and 1858 by the English Handel Society (founded by Sir George Macfarren).[146]
+The 105-volume Händel-Gesellschaft ("Handel Society") edition was published between 1858 and 1902 – mainly due to the efforts of Friedrich Chrysander. For modern performance, the realisation of the basso continuo reflects 19th century practice. Vocal scores drawn from the edition were published by Novello in London, but some scores, such as the vocal score to Samson, are incomplete.
+The continuing Hallische Händel-Ausgabe edition was first inaugurated in 1955 in the Halle region in Saxony-Anhalt, Eastern Germany. It did not start as a critical edition, but after heavy criticism of the first volumes, which were performing editions without a critical apparatus (for example, the opera Serse was published with the title character recast as a tenor, reflecting pre-war German practice), it repositioned itself as a critical edition. Influenced in part by cold-war realities, editorial work was inconsistent: misprints are found in abundance and editors failed to consult important sources. In 1985 a committee was formed to establish better standards for the edition. The unification of Germany in 1990 removed communication problems, and the volumes issued have since shown a significant improvement in standards.[115]
+Between 1978 and 1986 the German academic Bernd Baselt catalogued Handel's works in his Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis publication. The catalogue has achieved wide acceptance and is used as the modern numbering system, with each of Handel's works designated an "HWV" number, for example Messiah is catalogued as "HWV 56".
+Handel's works were collected and preserved by two men: Sir Samuel Hellier, a country squire whose musical acquisitions form the nucleus of the Shaw-Hellier Collection,[147] and the abolitionist Granville Sharp.[148] The catalogue accompanying the National Portrait Gallery exhibition marking the tercentenary of the composer's birth calls them two men of the late eighteenth century "who have left us solid evidence of the means by which they indulged their enthusiasm".[149] With his English oratorios, such as Messiah and Solomon, the coronation anthems, and other works including Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, Handel became a national icon in Britain, and featured in the BBC series, The Birth of British Music: Handel – The Conquering Hero.[150]
+After his death, Handel's Italian operas fell into obscurity, except for selections such as the aria from Serse, "Ombra mai fu". The oratorios continued to be performed but not long after Handel's death they were thought to need some modernisation, and Mozart orchestrated German versions of Messiah and other works. Throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, particularly in the Anglophone countries, his reputation rested primarily on his English oratorios, which were customarily performed by choruses of amateur singers on solemn occasions.  The centenary of his death, in 1859, was celebrated by a performance of Messiah at The Crystal Palace, involving 2,765 singers and 460 instrumentalists, who played for an audience of about 10,000 people.[151]
+Recent decades have revived his secular cantatas and what one might call 'secular oratorios' or 'concert operas'. Of the former, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (1739) (set to texts by John Dryden) and Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne (1713) are noteworthy. For his secular oratorios, Handel turned to classical mythology for subjects, producing such works as Acis and Galatea (1719), Hercules (1745) and Semele (1744). These works have a close kinship with the sacred oratorios, particularly in the vocal writing for the English-language texts. They also share the lyrical and dramatic qualities of Handel's Italian operas. As such, they are sometimes fully staged as operas. With the rediscovery of his theatrical works, Handel, in addition to his renown as instrumentalist, orchestral writer, and melodist, is now perceived as being one of opera's great musical dramatists.
+The original form of his name, Georg Friedrich Händel, is generally used in Germany and elsewhere, but he is known as "Haendel" in France. A different composer, Jacob Handl or Händl (1550–1591) is usually known by the Latin form Jacobus Gallus that appears in his publications.
+Handel has generally been accorded high esteem by fellow composers, both in his own time and since.[152] Johann Sebastian Bach  attempted, unsuccessfully, to meet Handel while he was visiting Halle.[153] (Handel was born in the same year as Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.) Mozart is reputed to have said of him, "Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt."[154] To Beethoven he was "the master of us all... the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb."[154] Beethoven emphasised above all the simplicity and popular appeal of Handel's music when he said, "Go to him to learn how to achieve great effects, by such simple means."
+Since 1831, when William Crotch raised the issue in his Substance of Several Lectures on Music, scholars have extensively studied Handel's "borrowing" of music from other composers. Summarising the field in 2005, Richard Taruskin wrote that Handel "seems to have been the champion of all parodists, adapting both his own works and those of other composers in unparalleled numbers and with unparalleled exactitude."[155] Among the composers whose music has been shown to have been re-used by Handel are Alessandro Stradella, Gottlieb Muffat, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti[156] Giacomo Carissimi, Georg Philipp Telemann, Carl Heinrich Graun, Leonardo Vinci, Jacobus Gallus, Francesco Antonio Urio, Reinhard Keiser, Francesco Gasparini, Giovanni Bononcini, William Boyce, Henry Lawes, Michael Wise, Agostino Steffani, Franz Johann Habermann, and numerous others.[157]
+In an essay published in 1985, John H. Roberts demonstrated that Handel's borrowings were unusually frequent even for his own era, enough to have been criticised by contemporaries (notably Johann Mattheson); Roberts suggested several reasons for Handel's practice, including Handel's attempts to make certain works sound more up-to-date and more radically, his "basic lack of facility in inventing original ideas" – though Roberts took care to argue that this does not "diminish Handel's stature", which should be "judged not by his methods, still less by his motives in employing them, but solely by the effects he achieves."[158]
+After Handel's death, many composers wrote works based on or inspired by his music. The first movement from Louis Spohr's Symphony No. 6, Op. 116, "The Age of Bach and Handel", resembles two melodies from Handel's Messiah. In 1797 Ludwig van Beethoven published the 12 Variations in G major on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ from Judas Maccabaeus by Handel, for cello and piano. In 1822 Beethoven composed The Consecration of the House overture, which also bears the influence of Handel. Guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel, Op. 107 for guitar, based on Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major, HWV 430, for harpsichord.
+In 1861, using a theme from the second of Handel's harpsichord suites, Johannes Brahms wrote the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24, one of his most successful works (praised by Richard Wagner).  Several works by the French composer Félix-Alexandre Guilmant use Handel's themes, for example his March on a Theme by Handel uses a theme from Messiah. French composer and flautist Philippe Gaubert wrote his Petite marche for flute and piano based on the fourth movement of Handel's Trio Sonata, Op. 5, No. 2, HWV 397. Argentine composer Luis Gianneo composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel for piano. In 1911, Australian-born composer and pianist Percy Grainger based one of his most famous works on the final movement of Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major (just like Giuliani). He first wrote some variations on the theme, which he titled Variations on Handel's 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' . Then he used the first sixteen bars of his set of variations to create Handel in the Strand, one of his most beloved pieces, of which he made several versions (for example, the piano solo version from 1930). Arnold Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B-flat major (1933) was composed after Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6/7.[159]
+Handel is honoured with a feast day on 28 July in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church, with Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell. In the Lutheran Calendar of Saints Handel and Bach share that date with Heinrich Schütz, and Handel and Bach are commemorated in the calendar of saints prepared by the Order of Saint Luke for the use of the United Methodist Church.[160] The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (Westminster John Knox Press, 2018) commemorates him on April 20.
+In 1942, Handel was the subject of the British biopic The Great Mr. Handel directed by Norman Walker and starring Wilfrid Lawson. It was made at Denham Studios by the Rank Organisation, and shot in Technicolor. He is also the central character in the television films God Rot Tunbridge Wells! (1985) and Handel's Last Chance (1996) and the stage play All the Angels (2015). Handel was portrayed by Jeroen Krabbé as the antagonist in the film Farinelli (1994).

en/2187.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,125 @@

+George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (/ˈhændəl/;[a] born Georg Friederich Händel[b] [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhɛndl̩] (listen); 23 February 1685 (O.S.) [(N.S.) 5 March] – 14 April 1759)[2][c] was a German, later British, Baroque composer who spent the bulk of his career in London, becoming well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi and organ concertos. Handel received important training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in 1727.[5] He was strongly influenced both by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition. He would become a huge influence on classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven.
+Within fifteen years, Handel had started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. Musicologist Winton Dean writes that his operas show that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order."[6] As Alexander's Feast (1736) was well received, Handel made a transition to English choral works. After his success with Messiah (1742) he never composed an Italian opera again. Almost blind, and having lived in England for nearly fifty years, he died in 1759, a respected and rich man. His funeral was given full state honours, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
+Handel is regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Baroque era, with works such as Messiah, Water Music, and Music for the Royal Fireworks remaining steadfastly popular.[7] One of his four coronation anthems, Zadok the Priest (1727), composed for the coronation of George II, has been performed at every subsequent British coronation, traditionally during the sovereign's anointing. Another of his English oratorios, Solomon (1748), has also remained popular, with the Sinfonia that opens act 3 (known more commonly as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba") featuring at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. Handel composed more than forty opera serias in over thirty years, and since the late 1960s, with the revival of baroque music and historically informed musical performance, interest in Handel's operas has grown.
+Handel was born in 1685 in Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg (then part of Brandenburg-Prussia), to Georg Händel and Dorothea Taust.[8] His father, aged sixty-three when George Frideric was born, was an eminent barber-surgeon who served the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and the Margraviate of Brandenburg.[9]
+Georg Händel (senior) was the son of a coppersmith, Valentin Händel (1582–1636), who had emigrated from Eisleben in 1608 with his first wife Anna Belching, the daughter of a master coppersmith. They were Protestants and chose reliably Protestant Saxony over Silesia, a Habsburg possession, as religious tensions mounted in the years before the Thirty Years War.[10] Halle was a relatively prosperous city, home of a salt-mining industry and center of trade (and member of the Hanseatic League).[11] The Margrave of Brandenburg became the administrator of the archiepiscopal territories of Mainz, including Magdeburg when they converted, and by the early 17th century held his court in Halle, which attracted renowned musicians.[d] Even the smaller churches all had "able organists and fair choirs",[e] and humanities and the letters thrived (Shakespeare was performed in the theaters early in the 17th century).[13] The Thirty Years War brought extensive destruction to Halle, and by the 1680s it was impoverished.[10] However, since the middle of the war the city had been under the administration of the Duke of Saxony, and soon after the end of the war he would bring musicians trained in Dresden to his court in Weissenfels.[14]
+The arts and music, however, flourished only among the higher strata (not only in Halle but throughout Germany),[15] of which Handel's family was not a member. Georg Händel (senior) was born at the beginning of the war, and was apprenticed to a barber in Halle at the age of 14, after his father died.[f] When he was 20, he married the widow of the official barber-surgeon of a suburb of Halle, inheriting his practice. With this, Georg determinedly began the process of becoming self-made; by dint of his "conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous" lifestyle,[16] he guided the five children he had with Anna who reached adulthood into the medical profession (except his youngest daughter, who married a government official).[17] Anna died in 1682. Within a year Georg married again, this time to the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Pastor Georg Taust of the Church of St. Bartholomew in Giebichenstein,[18] who himself came from a long line of Lutheran pastors.[16] Handel was the second child of this marriage; the first son was stillborn.[19] Two younger sisters were born after the birth of George Frideric: Dorthea Sophia, born 6 October 1687, and Johanna Christiana, born 10 January 1690.[20]
+Early in his life Handel is reported to have attended the Gymnasium in Halle,[21] where the headmaster, Johann Praetorius [de], was reputed to be an ardent musician.[22] Whether Handel remained there, and if he did for how long, is unknown, but many biographers suggest that he was withdrawn from school by his father, based on the characterization of him by Handel's first biographer, John Mainwaring. Mainwaring is the source for almost all information (little as it is) of Handel's childhood, and much of that information came from J.C. Smith, Jr., Handel's confidant and copyist.[23] Whether it came from Smith or elsewhere, Mainwaring frequently relates misinformation.[g] It is from Mainwaring that the portrait comes of Handel's father as implacably opposed to any musical education. Mainwaring writes that Georg Händel was "alarmed" at Handel's very early propensity for music,[h] "took every measure to oppose it", including forbidding any musical instrument in the house and preventing Handel from going to any house where they might be found.[25] This did nothing to dampen young Handel's inclination; in fact, it did the reverse. Mainwaring tells the story of Handel's secret attic spinet: Handel "found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep".[26] Although both John Hawkins and Charles Burney credited this tale, Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible" and a feat of "poetic imagination"[27] and Lang considers it one of the unproven "romantic stories" that surrounded Handel's childhood.[28] But Handel had to have had some experience with the keyboard to have made the impression in Weissenfels that resulted in his receiving formal musical training.[29]
+Sometime between the ages of seven and nine, Handel accompanied his father to Weissenfels where he came under the notice of one whom Handel thereafter always regarded throughout life as his benefactor,[30] Duke Johann Adolf I.[i] Somehow Handel made his way to the court organ in the palace chapel of the Holy Trinity, where he surprised everyone with his playing.[33] Overhearing this performance and noting the youth of the performer caused the Duke, whose suggestions were not to be disregarded, to recommend to Georg Händel that Handel be given musical instruction.[34] Handel's father engaged the organist at the Halle parish church, the young Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, to instruct Handel. Zachow would be the only teacher that Handel ever had.[28] Because of his church employment, Zachow was an organist "of the old school", reveling in fugues, canons and counterpoint.[30] But he was also familiar with developments in music across Europe and his own compositions "embraced the new concerted, dramatic style".[j] When Zachow discovered the talent of Handel, he introduced him "to a vast collection of German and Italian music, which he possessed, sacred and profane, vocal and instrumental compositions of different schools, different styles, and of every master".[30] Many traits considered "Handelian" can be traced back to Zachow's music.[36] At the same time Handel continued practice on the harpsichord, learned violin and organ, but according to Burney his special affection was for the hautbois (oboe).[37] Schoelcher speculates that his youthful devotion to the instrument explains the large number of pieces he composed for oboe.[38]
+With respect to instruction in composition, in addition to having Handel apply himself to traditional fugue and cantus firmus work, Zachow, recognizing Handel's precocious talents, systematically introduced Handel to the variety of styles and masterworks contained in his extensive library. He did this by requiring Handel to copy selected scores. "I used to write like the devil in those days", Handel recalled much later.[39] Much of this copying was entered into a notebook that Handel maintained for the rest of his life. Although it has since disappeared, the notebook has been sufficiently described to understand what pieces Zachow wished Handel to study. Among the chief composers represented in this exercise book were Johann Krieger, an "old master" in the fugue and prominent organ composer, Johann Caspar Kerll, a representative of the "southern style" after his teacher Frescobaldi and imitated later by Handel,[k] Johann Jakob Froberger, an "internationalist" also closely studied by Buxtehude and Bach, and Georg Muffat, whose amalgam of French and Italian styles and his synthesis of musical forms influenced Handel.[41]
+Mainwaring writes that during this time Zachow had begun to have Handel assume some of his church duties. Zachow, Mainwaring asserts, was "often" absent, "from his love of company, and a chearful glass", and Handel therefore performed on organ frequently.[42] What is more, according to Mainwaring, Handel began composing, at the age of nine, church services for voice and instruments "and from that time actually did compose a service every week for three years successively."[43] Mainwaring ends this chapter of Handel's life by concluding that three or four years had been enough to allow Handel to surpass Zachow, and Handel had become "impatient for another situation"; "Berlin was the place agreed upon."[44] Carelessness with dates or sequences (and possibly imaginative interpretation by Mainwaring) makes this period confused.[l]
+Handel's father died on 11 February 1697.[45] It was German custom for friends and family to compose funeral odes for a substantial burgher like Georg,[46] and young Handel discharged his duty with a poem dated 18 February and signed with his name and (in deference to his father's wishes) "dedicated to the liberal arts."[47] At the time Handel was studying either at Halle's Lutheran Gymnasium or the Latin School.[46]
+Mainwaring has Handel traveling to Berlin the next year, 1698.[44] The problem with Mainwaring as an authority for this date, however, is that he tells of how Handel's father communicated with the "king"[m] during Handel's stay, declining the Court's offer to send Handel to Italy on a stipend[49] and that his father died "after his return from Berlin."[50] But since Georg Händel died in 1697, either the date of the trip or Mainwaring's statements about Handel's father must be in error. Early biographers solved the problem by making the year of the trip 1696, then noting that at the age of 11 Handel would need a guardian, so they have Handel's father or a friend of the family accompany him, all the while puzzling over why the elder Handel, who wanted Handel to become a lawyer, would spend the sum to lead his son further into the temptation of music as a career.[51] Schoelcher for example has Handel traveling to Berlin at 11, meeting both Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti in Berlin and then returning at the direction of his father.[52] But Ariosti was not in Berlin before the death of Handel's father,[53] and Handel could not have met Bononcini in Berlin before 1702.[54] Modern biographers either accept the year as 1698, since most reliable older authorities agree with it,[n] and discount what Mainwaring says about what took place during the trip or assume that Mainwaring conflated two or more visits to Berlin, as he did with Handel's later trips to Venice.[55]
+Perhaps to fulfill a promise to his father or simply because he saw himself as "dedicated to the liberal arts," on 10 February 1702 Handel matriculated at the University of Halle.[56] That university had only recently been founded. In 1694 the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III (later Prussian King Frederick I) created the school, largely to provide a lecture forum for the jurist Christian Thomasius who had been expelled from Leipzig for his liberal views.[13] Händel did not enroll in the faculty of law, although he almost certainly attended lectures.[57] Thomasius was an intellectual and academic crusader who was the first German academic to lecture in German and also denounced witch trials. Lang believes that Thomasius instilled in Händel a "respect for the dignity and freedom of man's mind and the solemn majesty of the law," principles that would have drawn him to and kept him in England for half a century.[58] Handel also there encountered theologian and professor of Oriental languages August Hermann Francke, who was particularly solicitous of children, particularly orphans. The orphanage he founded became a model for Germany, and undoubtedly influenced Handel's own charitable impulse, when he assigned the rights of Messiah to London's Foundling Hospital.[59]
+Shortly after commencing his university education, Handel (though Lutheran[o]) on 13 March 1702 accepted the position of organist at the Calvinist Cathedral in Halle, the Domkirche, replacing J.C. Leporin, for whom he had acted as assistant.[61] The position, which was a one-year probationary appointment showed the foundation he had received from Zachow, for a church organist and cantor was a highly prestigious office. From it he received 5 thalers a year and lodgings in the run-down castle of Moritzburg. [62]
+Around this same time Handel made the acquaintance of Telemann. Four years Handel's senior, Telemann was studying law and assisting cantor Johann Kuhnau (Bach's predecessor at the Thomaskirche there). Telemann recalled forty years later in an autobiography for Mattheson's Grundlage: "The writing of the excellent Johann Kuhnau served as a model for me in fugue and counterpoint; but in fashioning melodic movements and examining them Handel and I were constantly occupied, frequently visiting each other as well as writing letters."[63]
+Although Mainwaring records that Handel wrote weekly when assistant to Zachow and as probationary organist at Domkirche part of his duty was to provide suitable music,[p] no sacred compositions from his Halle period can now be identified.[65] Mattheson, however, summarized his opinion of Handel's church cantatas written in Halle: "Handel in those days set very, very long arias and sheerly unending cantatas which, while not possessing the proper knack or correct taste, were perfect so far as harmony is concerned."[66]
+Early chamber works do exist, but it is difficult to date any of them to Handel's time in Halle. Many historians until recently followed Chrysander and designated the six trio sonatas for two oboes and basso continuo as his first known composition, supposedly written in 1696 (when Handel was 11).[67] Lang doubts the dating based on a handwritten date of a copy (1700) and stylistic considerations. Lang writes that the works "show thorough acquaintance with the distilled sonata style of the Corelli school" and are notable for "the formal security and the cleanness of the texture."[68] Hogwood considers all of the oboe trio sonatas spurious and even suggests that some parts cannot be performed on oboe.[69]  That authentic manuscript sources do not exist and that Handel never recycled any material from these works make their authenticity doubtful.[70] Other early chamber works were printed in Amsterdam in 1724 as opus 1, but it is impossible to tell which are early works in their original form, rather than later re-workings by Handel, a frequent practice of his.[68]
+Handel's probationary appointment to Domkirche expired in March 1703. By July[q] Handel was in Hamburg. Since he left no explanation for the move[r] biographers have offered their own speculation. Burrows believes that the answer can be found by untangling Mainwaring's confused chronology of the trip to Berlin. Burrows dates this trip to 1702 or 1703 (after his father's death) and concluded that since Handel (through a "friend and relation" at the Berlin court) turned down Frederick's offer to subsidize his musical education in Italy (with the implicit understanding that he would become a court musician on his return), Handel was no longer able to expect preferment (whether as musician, lawyer or otherwise) within Brandenburg-Prussia. And since he was attracted to secular, dramatic music (by meeting the Italians Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti and through the influence of Telemann), Hamburg, a free city with an established opera company, was the logical choice.[74] The question remains, however, why Handel rejected the King's offer, given that Italy was the center of opera. Lang suggests that, influenced by the teachings of Thomasius, Handel's character was such that he was unable to make himself subservient to anyone, even a king. Lang sees Handel as someone who could not accept class distinctions that required him to regard himself as a social inferior. "What Handel craved was personal freedom to raise himself out of his provincial milieu to a life of culture."[75] Burrows notes that like his father, Handel was able to accept royal (and aristocratic) favors without considering himself a court servant.[76] And so given the embarrassed financial condition of his mother,[50] Handel set off for Hamburg to obtain experience while supporting himself.
+In 1703 he accepted a position as violinist and harpsichordist in the orchestra of the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt.[77] There he met the composers Johann Mattheson, Christoph Graupner and Reinhard Keiser. His first two operas, Almira and Nero, were produced in 1705.[78] He produced two other operas, Daphne and Florindo, in 1708. It is unclear whether Handel directed these performances.
+According to Mainwaring, in 1706 Handel travelled to Italy at the invitation of Ferdinando de' Medici. Other sources say Handel was invited by Gian Gastone de' Medici, whom Handel had met in 1703–1704 in Hamburg.[79] De' Medici[which?], who had a keen interest in opera, was trying to make Florence Italy's musical capital by attracting the leading talents of his day. In Italy Handel met librettist Antonio Salvi, with whom he later collaborated. Handel left for Rome and, since opera was (temporarily) banned in the Papal States, composed sacred music for the Roman clergy. His famous Dixit Dominus (1707) is from this era. He also composed cantatas in pastoral style for musical gatherings in the palaces of duchess Aurora Sanseverino (whom Mainwaring called "Donna Laura")[80] one of the most influential patrons from the Kingdom of Naples, and cardinals Pietro Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphili and Carlo Colonna. Two oratorios, La resurrezione and Il trionfo del tempo, were produced in a private setting for Ruspoli and Ottoboni in 1709 and 1710, respectively. Rodrigo, his first all-Italian opera, was produced in the Cocomero theatre in Florence in 1707.[81] Agrippina was first produced in 1709 at Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice, owned by the Grimanis. The opera, with a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, ran for 27 nights successively.[82] The audience, thunderstruck with the grandeur and sublimity of his style,[83] applauded for Il caro Sassone ("the dear Saxon" – referring to Handel's German origins).
+In 1710, Handel became Kapellmeister to German prince George, the Elector of Hanover, who in 1714 would become King George I of Great Britain and Ireland.[84] He visited Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici and her husband in Düsseldorf on his way to London in 1710. With his opera Rinaldo, based on La Gerusalemme Liberata by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, Handel enjoyed great success, although it was composed quickly, with many borrowings from his older Italian works.[85] This work contains one of Handel's favourite arias, Cara sposa, amante cara, and the famous Lascia ch'io pianga.
+In 1712, Handel decided to settle permanently in England. In the summer of 1713 he lived at Mr Mathew Andrews' estate in Barn Elms, Surrey.[86][87] He received a yearly income of £200 from Queen Anne after composing for her the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, first performed in 1713.[88][89]
+One of his most important patrons was The 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, a young and extremely wealthy member of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family.[90] While living in the mansion of Lord Burlington, Handel wrote Amadigi di Gaula, a "magic" opera, about a damsel in distress, based on the tragedy by Antoine Houdar de la Motte.
+The conception of an opera as a coherent structure was slow to capture Handel's imagination[91] and he composed no operas for five years. In July 1717 Handel's Water Music was performed more than three times on the River Thames for the King and his guests. It is said the compositions spurred reconciliation between Handel and the King, supposedly annoyed by the composer's abandonment of his Hanover post.[92]
+In 1717 Handel became house composer at Cannons in Middlesex, where he laid the cornerstone for his future choral compositions in the Chandos Anthems.[93] Romain Rolland wrote that these anthems (or Psalms) stood in relation to Handel's oratorios, much the same way that the Italian cantatas stood to his operas: "splendid sketches of the more monumental works."[94] Another work, which he wrote for The 1st Duke of Chandos, the owner of Cannons, was Acis and Galatea: during Handel's lifetime it was his most performed work. Winton Dean wrote, "the music catches breath and disturbs the memory".[95]
+In 1719 the Duke of Chandos became one of the composer's important patrons and main subscribers to his new opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, but his patronage declined after Chandos lost money in the South Sea bubble, which burst in 1720 in one of history's greatest financial cataclysms. Handel himself invested in South Sea stock in 1716, when prices were low[96] and sold before 1720.[97]
+In May 1719, The 1st Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chamberlain, ordered Handel to look for new singers.[98] Handel travelled to Dresden to attend the newly built opera. He saw Teofane by Antonio Lotti, and engaged members of the cast for the Royal Academy of Music, founded by a group of aristocrats to assure themselves a constant supply of baroque opera or opera seria. Handel may have invited John Smith, his fellow student in Halle, and his son Johann Christoph Schmidt, to become his secretary and amanuensis.[99] By 1723 he had moved into a Georgian house at 25 Brook Street, which he rented for the rest of his life.[100] This house, where he rehearsed, copied music and sold tickets, is now the Handel House Museum.[s] During twelve months between 1724 and 1725, Handel wrote three outstanding and successful operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Handel's operas are filled with da capo arias, such as Svegliatevi nel core. After composing Silete venti, he concentrated on opera and stopped writing cantatas. Scipio, from which the regimental slow march of the British Grenadier Guards is derived,[101] was performed as a stopgap, waiting for the arrival of Faustina Bordoni.
+In 1727 Handel was commissioned to write four anthems for the Coronation ceremony of King George II. One of these, Zadok the Priest, has been played at every British coronation ceremony since.[102] In 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which made fun of the type of Italian opera Handel had popularised in London, premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time.[103] After nine years the Royal Academy of Music ceased to function but Handel soon started a new company.
+The Queen's Theatre at the Haymarket (now Her Majesty's Theatre), established in 1705 by architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, quickly became an opera house.[104] Between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 of Handel's operas premièred there.[105] In 1729 Handel became joint manager of the theatre with John James Heidegger.
+Handel travelled to Italy to engage new singers and also composed seven more operas, among them the comic masterpiece Partenope and the "magic" opera Orlando.[106] After two commercially successful English oratorios Esther and Deborah, he was able to invest again in the South Sea Company. Handel reworked his Acis and Galatea which then became his most successful work ever. Handel failed to compete with the Opera of the Nobility, who engaged musicians such as Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicolo Porpora and the famous castrato Farinelli. The strong support by Frederick, Prince of Wales caused conflicts in the royal family. In March 1734 Handel composed a wedding anthem This is the day which the Lord hath made, and a serenata Parnasso in Festa for Anne, Princess Royal.[107]
+Despite the problems the Opera of the Nobility was causing him at the time, Handel's neighbour in Brook Street, Mary Delany, reported on a party she invited Handel to at her house on 12 April 1734 where he was in good spirits:
+I had Lady Rich and her daughter, Lady Cath. Hanmer and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Percival, Sir John Stanley and my brother, Mrs. Donellan, Strada [star soprano of Handel's operas]  and Mr. Coot.  Lord Shaftesbury begged of Mr. Percival to bring him, and being a profess'd friend of Mr. Handel (who was here also) was admitted; I never was so well entertained at an opera!  Mr. Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o'clock till eleven.  I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine and biscuits.  Everybody was easy and seemed pleased.[108]
+In 1733 the Earl of Essex received a letter with the following sentence: "Handel became so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs." The board of chief investors expected Handel to retire when his contract ended, but Handel immediately looked for another theatre. In cooperation with John Rich he started his third company at Covent Garden Theatre. Rich was renowned for his spectacular productions. He suggested Handel use his small chorus and introduce the dancing of Marie Sallé, for whom Handel composed Terpsicore. In 1735 he introduced organ concertos between the acts. For the first time Handel allowed Gioacchino Conti, who had no time to learn his part, to substitute arias.[109] Financially, Ariodante was a failure, although he introduced ballet suites at the end of each act.[110] Alcina, his last opera with a magic content, and Alexander's Feast or the Power of Music based on John Dryden's Alexander's Feast starred Anna Maria Strada del Pò and John Beard.
+In April 1737, at age 52, Handel apparently suffered a stroke which disabled the use of four fingers on his right hand, preventing him from performing.[111] In summer the disorder seemed at times to affect his understanding. Nobody expected that Handel would ever be able to perform again. But whether the affliction was rheumatism, a stroke or a nervous breakdown, he recovered remarkably quickly .[112] To aid his recovery, Handel had travelled to Aachen, a spa in Germany. During six weeks he took long hot baths, and ended up playing the organ for a surprised audience.[113] He wrote  Faramondo in December 1737 and Serse in January 1738. Deidamia, his last opera, a co-production with the Earl of Holderness,[114] was performed three times in 1741. Handel gave up the opera business, while he enjoyed more success with his English oratorios.[115]
+In 1738 he composed music for a musical clock with a pipe organ built by Charles Clay; it was bought by Gerrit Braamcamp and was in 2016 acquired by the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht.[116][117]
+Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, an allegory, Handel's first oratorio[118] was composed in Italy in 1707, followed by La resurrezione in 1708 which uses material from the Bible. The circumstances of Esther and its first performance, possibly in 1718, are obscure.[119] Another 12 years had passed when an act of piracy caused him to take up Esther once again.[120] Three earlier performances aroused such interest that they naturally prompted the idea of introducing it to a larger public. Next came Deborah, strongly coloured by the coronation anthems[121] and Athaliah, his first English Oratorio.[122] In these three oratorios Handel laid the foundation for the traditional use of the chorus which marks his later oratorios.[123] Handel became sure of himself, broader in his presentation, and more diverse in his composition.[124]
+It is evident how much he learned from Arcangelo Corelli about writing for instruments, and from Alessandro Scarlatti about writing for the solo voice; but there is no single composer who taught him how to write for chorus.[125] Handel tended more and more to replace Italian soloists by English ones. The most significant reason for this change was the dwindling financial returns from his operas.[126] Thus a tradition was created for oratorios which was to govern their future performance. The performances were given without costumes and action; the singers appeared in their own clothes.[127]
+In 1736 Handel produced Alexander's Feast. John Beard appeared for the first time as one of Handel's principal singers and became Handel's permanent tenor soloist for the rest of Handel's life.[128] The piece was a great success and it encouraged Handel to make the transition from writing Italian operas to English choral works. In Saul, Handel was collaborating with Charles Jennens and experimenting with three trombones, a carillon and extra-large military kettledrums (from the Tower of London), to be sure "...it will be most excessive noisy".[129] Saul and Israel in Egypt both from 1739 head the list of great, mature oratorios, in which the da capo aria became the exception and not the rule.[130] Israel in Egypt consists of little else but choruses, borrowing from the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline. In his next works Handel changed his course. In these works he laid greater stress on the effects of orchestra and soloists; the chorus retired into the background.[131] L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has a rather diverting character; the work is light and fresh.
+During the summer of 1741, The 3rd Duke of Devonshire invited Handel to Dublin, capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, to give concerts for the benefit of local hospitals.[132] His Messiah was first performed at the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street on 13 April 1742, with 26 boys and five men from the combined choirs of St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals participating.[133] Handel secured a balance between soloists and chorus which he never surpassed.
+In 1747 Handel wrote his oratorio Alexander Balus. This work was produced at Covent Garden Theatre in London, on 23 March 1748, and to the aria Hark! hark! He strikes the golden lyre, Handel wrote the accompaniment for mandolin, harp, violin, viola, and violoncello.[134] Another of his English oratorios, Solomon, was first performed on 17 March 1749 at the Covent Garden Theatre.[135] Solomon contains a short and lively instrumental passage for two oboes and strings in act 3, known as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba".
+The use of English soloists reached its height at the first performance of Samson. The work is highly theatrical. The role of the chorus became increasingly important in his later oratorios. Jephtha was first performed on 26 February 1752; even though it was his last oratorio, it was no less a masterpiece than his earlier works.[136]
+In 1749 Handel composed Music for the Royal Fireworks; 12,000 people attended the first performance.[137] In 1750 he arranged a performance of Messiah to benefit the Foundling Hospital. The performance was considered a great success and was followed by annual concerts that continued throughout his life. In recognition of his patronage, Handel was made a governor of the Hospital the day after his initial concert. He bequeathed a copy of Messiah to the institution upon his death.[138] His involvement with the Foundling Hospital is today commemorated with a permanent exhibition in London's Foundling Museum, which also holds the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. In addition to the Foundling Hospital, Handel also gave to a charity that assisted impoverished musicians and their families.
+In August 1750, on a journey back from Germany to London, Handel was seriously injured in a carriage accident between The Hague and Haarlem in the Netherlands.[139] In 1751 one eye started to fail. The cause was a cataract which was operated on by the great charlatan Chevalier Taylor. This did not improve his eyesight, but possibly made it worse.[115] He was completely blind by 1752. He died in 1759 at home in Brook Street, at age 74. The last performance he attended was of Messiah. Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.[140] More than three thousand mourners attended his funeral, which was given full state honours.
+Handel never married, and kept his personal life private. His initial will bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his niece Johanna, however four codicils distributed much of his estate to other relations, servants, friends and charities.[141]
+Handel owned an art collection that was auctioned posthumously in 1760.[142] The auction catalogue listed approximately seventy paintings and ten prints (other paintings were bequeathed).[142]
+Handel's compositions include 42 operas, 25 oratorios, more than 120 cantatas, trios and duets, numerous arias, chamber music, a large number of ecumenical pieces, odes and serenatas, 18 concerti grossi and 12 organ concertos. His most famous work, the oratorio Messiah with its "Hallelujah" chorus, is among the most popular works in choral music and has become the centrepiece of the Christmas season. The Lobkowicz Palace in Prague holds Mozart's copy of Messiah, complete with handwritten annotations. Among the works with opus numbers published and popularised in his lifetime are the Organ concertos Op. 4 and Op. 7, together with the Opus 3 and Opus 6 Concerti grossi; the latter incorporate an earlier organ concerto The Cuckoo and the Nightingale in which birdsong is imitated in the upper registers of the organ. Also notable are his 16 keyboard suites, especially The Harmonious Blacksmith.
+Handel introduced previously uncommon musical instruments in his works: the viola d'amore and violetta marina (Orlando), the lute (Ode for St. Cecilia's Day), three trombones (Saul), clarinets or small high cornetts (Tamerlano), theorbo, French horn (Water Music), lyrichord, double bassoon, viola da gamba, carillon (bell chimes), positive organ, and harp (Giulio Cesare, Alexander's Feast).[143]
+The first published catalogue of Handel's works appeared as an appendix to Mainwaring's Memoirs.[144] Between 1787 and 1797 Samuel Arnold compiled a 180-volume collection of Handel's works—however, it was far from complete.[145] Also incomplete was the collection produced between 1843 and 1858 by the English Handel Society (founded by Sir George Macfarren).[146]
+The 105-volume Händel-Gesellschaft ("Handel Society") edition was published between 1858 and 1902 – mainly due to the efforts of Friedrich Chrysander. For modern performance, the realisation of the basso continuo reflects 19th century practice. Vocal scores drawn from the edition were published by Novello in London, but some scores, such as the vocal score to Samson, are incomplete.
+The continuing Hallische Händel-Ausgabe edition was first inaugurated in 1955 in the Halle region in Saxony-Anhalt, Eastern Germany. It did not start as a critical edition, but after heavy criticism of the first volumes, which were performing editions without a critical apparatus (for example, the opera Serse was published with the title character recast as a tenor, reflecting pre-war German practice), it repositioned itself as a critical edition. Influenced in part by cold-war realities, editorial work was inconsistent: misprints are found in abundance and editors failed to consult important sources. In 1985 a committee was formed to establish better standards for the edition. The unification of Germany in 1990 removed communication problems, and the volumes issued have since shown a significant improvement in standards.[115]
+Between 1978 and 1986 the German academic Bernd Baselt catalogued Handel's works in his Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis publication. The catalogue has achieved wide acceptance and is used as the modern numbering system, with each of Handel's works designated an "HWV" number, for example Messiah is catalogued as "HWV 56".
+Handel's works were collected and preserved by two men: Sir Samuel Hellier, a country squire whose musical acquisitions form the nucleus of the Shaw-Hellier Collection,[147] and the abolitionist Granville Sharp.[148] The catalogue accompanying the National Portrait Gallery exhibition marking the tercentenary of the composer's birth calls them two men of the late eighteenth century "who have left us solid evidence of the means by which they indulged their enthusiasm".[149] With his English oratorios, such as Messiah and Solomon, the coronation anthems, and other works including Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, Handel became a national icon in Britain, and featured in the BBC series, The Birth of British Music: Handel – The Conquering Hero.[150]
+After his death, Handel's Italian operas fell into obscurity, except for selections such as the aria from Serse, "Ombra mai fu". The oratorios continued to be performed but not long after Handel's death they were thought to need some modernisation, and Mozart orchestrated German versions of Messiah and other works. Throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, particularly in the Anglophone countries, his reputation rested primarily on his English oratorios, which were customarily performed by choruses of amateur singers on solemn occasions.  The centenary of his death, in 1859, was celebrated by a performance of Messiah at The Crystal Palace, involving 2,765 singers and 460 instrumentalists, who played for an audience of about 10,000 people.[151]
+Recent decades have revived his secular cantatas and what one might call 'secular oratorios' or 'concert operas'. Of the former, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (1739) (set to texts by John Dryden) and Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne (1713) are noteworthy. For his secular oratorios, Handel turned to classical mythology for subjects, producing such works as Acis and Galatea (1719), Hercules (1745) and Semele (1744). These works have a close kinship with the sacred oratorios, particularly in the vocal writing for the English-language texts. They also share the lyrical and dramatic qualities of Handel's Italian operas. As such, they are sometimes fully staged as operas. With the rediscovery of his theatrical works, Handel, in addition to his renown as instrumentalist, orchestral writer, and melodist, is now perceived as being one of opera's great musical dramatists.
+The original form of his name, Georg Friedrich Händel, is generally used in Germany and elsewhere, but he is known as "Haendel" in France. A different composer, Jacob Handl or Händl (1550–1591) is usually known by the Latin form Jacobus Gallus that appears in his publications.
+Handel has generally been accorded high esteem by fellow composers, both in his own time and since.[152] Johann Sebastian Bach  attempted, unsuccessfully, to meet Handel while he was visiting Halle.[153] (Handel was born in the same year as Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.) Mozart is reputed to have said of him, "Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt."[154] To Beethoven he was "the master of us all... the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb."[154] Beethoven emphasised above all the simplicity and popular appeal of Handel's music when he said, "Go to him to learn how to achieve great effects, by such simple means."
+Since 1831, when William Crotch raised the issue in his Substance of Several Lectures on Music, scholars have extensively studied Handel's "borrowing" of music from other composers. Summarising the field in 2005, Richard Taruskin wrote that Handel "seems to have been the champion of all parodists, adapting both his own works and those of other composers in unparalleled numbers and with unparalleled exactitude."[155] Among the composers whose music has been shown to have been re-used by Handel are Alessandro Stradella, Gottlieb Muffat, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti[156] Giacomo Carissimi, Georg Philipp Telemann, Carl Heinrich Graun, Leonardo Vinci, Jacobus Gallus, Francesco Antonio Urio, Reinhard Keiser, Francesco Gasparini, Giovanni Bononcini, William Boyce, Henry Lawes, Michael Wise, Agostino Steffani, Franz Johann Habermann, and numerous others.[157]
+In an essay published in 1985, John H. Roberts demonstrated that Handel's borrowings were unusually frequent even for his own era, enough to have been criticised by contemporaries (notably Johann Mattheson); Roberts suggested several reasons for Handel's practice, including Handel's attempts to make certain works sound more up-to-date and more radically, his "basic lack of facility in inventing original ideas" – though Roberts took care to argue that this does not "diminish Handel's stature", which should be "judged not by his methods, still less by his motives in employing them, but solely by the effects he achieves."[158]
+After Handel's death, many composers wrote works based on or inspired by his music. The first movement from Louis Spohr's Symphony No. 6, Op. 116, "The Age of Bach and Handel", resembles two melodies from Handel's Messiah. In 1797 Ludwig van Beethoven published the 12 Variations in G major on ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ from Judas Maccabaeus by Handel, for cello and piano. In 1822 Beethoven composed The Consecration of the House overture, which also bears the influence of Handel. Guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel, Op. 107 for guitar, based on Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major, HWV 430, for harpsichord.
+In 1861, using a theme from the second of Handel's harpsichord suites, Johannes Brahms wrote the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24, one of his most successful works (praised by Richard Wagner).  Several works by the French composer Félix-Alexandre Guilmant use Handel's themes, for example his March on a Theme by Handel uses a theme from Messiah. French composer and flautist Philippe Gaubert wrote his Petite marche for flute and piano based on the fourth movement of Handel's Trio Sonata, Op. 5, No. 2, HWV 397. Argentine composer Luis Gianneo composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel for piano. In 1911, Australian-born composer and pianist Percy Grainger based one of his most famous works on the final movement of Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major (just like Giuliani). He first wrote some variations on the theme, which he titled Variations on Handel's 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' . Then he used the first sixteen bars of his set of variations to create Handel in the Strand, one of his most beloved pieces, of which he made several versions (for example, the piano solo version from 1930). Arnold Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B-flat major (1933) was composed after Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6/7.[159]
+Handel is honoured with a feast day on 28 July in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church, with Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell. In the Lutheran Calendar of Saints Handel and Bach share that date with Heinrich Schütz, and Handel and Bach are commemorated in the calendar of saints prepared by the Order of Saint Luke for the use of the United Methodist Church.[160] The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (Westminster John Knox Press, 2018) commemorates him on April 20.
+In 1942, Handel was the subject of the British biopic The Great Mr. Handel directed by Norman Walker and starring Wilfrid Lawson. It was made at Denham Studios by the Rank Organisation, and shot in Technicolor. He is also the central character in the television films God Rot Tunbridge Wells! (1985) and Handel's Last Chance (1996) and the stage play All the Angels (2015). Handel was portrayed by Jeroen Krabbé as the antagonist in the film Farinelli (1994).

en/2188.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

+Georgia (/ˈdʒɔːrdʒə/) is a state in the Southeastern Region of the United States. Georgia is the 24th-largest in area and 8th most populous of the 50 United States. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, and to the west by Alabama. Its 2019 estimated population was 10,617,423, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.[4] Atlanta, a "beta(+)" global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with an estimated population of more than 6 million people in 2019,[5] is the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population.
+Founded in 1733 as a British colony, Georgia was the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established.[6] Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Colony of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.[7] From 1802 to 1804, western Georgia was split to form the Mississippi Territory, which later was admitted as the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, and was one of the original seven Confederate States.[7] Following the Civil War, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870.[7] In the post-Reconstruction era, Georgia's economy was transformed as a group of prominent politicians, businessmen, and journalists, led by Henry W. Grady, espoused the "New South" philosophy of sectional reconciliation, industrialization, and white supremacy.[8] During the 20th century, several Georgians, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., were prominent leaders during the civil rights movement.[7] Since 1945, Georgia has seen substantial population growth as part of the broader Sun Belt phenomenon. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing.[9]
+Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. The state's northernmost regions include the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the larger Appalachian Mountain system. The Piedmont plateau extends from the foothills of the Blue Ridge south to the Fall Line, an escarpment to the coastal plain defining the state's southern region. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet (1,458 m) above sea level; the lowest is the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of some high-altitude areas in the Blue Ridge, the entirety of the state has a humid subtropical climate. Of the states entirely east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area.[10]
+Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures. The British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733.[11] The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by (and named for) King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king.[12]
+The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778,[13] and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.
+In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
+In early 1861, Georgia joined the Confederacy (with secessionists having a slight majority of delegates)[14] and became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service, roughly one of every five who served.[15] In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union.
+With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering.[16] In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude blacks from politics.[17] They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration.[18] According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States (1877-1950), Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male.[19] Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
+An Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South.
+On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.[20]
+By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some in-migration by whites.[21] With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a noted civil rights leader, was elected to the state House in 1965, and served multiple terms there and in the state senate.
+Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration to ensure the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, earned admiration by writing in support of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972 Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since Reconstruction.
+In 1980, construction was completed on an expansion of what is now named Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). The busiest and most efficient airport in the world, it accommodates more than a hundred million passengers annually.[22] Employing more than 60,000 people, the airport became a major engine for economic growth.[22] With the advantages of cheap real estate, low taxes, right-to-work laws and a regulatory environment limiting government interference, the Atlanta metropolitan area became a national center of finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, logistics, and transportation companies, as well as the film, convention, and trade show businesses. As a testament to the city's growing international profile, in 1990 the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of Atlanta's status as a transportation hub, in 1991 UPS established its headquarters in a suburb. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York or Chicago.
+Beginning from the Atlantic Ocean, the state's eastern border with South Carolina runs up the Savannah River, northwest to its origin at the confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers. It then continues up the Tugaloo (originally Tugalo) and into the Chattooga River, its most significant tributary. These bounds were decided in the 1797 Treaty of Beaufort, and tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in the two Georgia v. South Carolina cases in 1923 and 1989.[citation needed]
+The border then takes a sharp turn around the tip of Rabun County, at latitude 35°N, though from this point it diverges slightly south (due to inaccuracies in the original survey). This northern border was originally the Georgia and North Carolina border all the way to the Mississippi River, until Tennessee was divided from North Carolina, and the Yazoo companies induced the legislature of Georgia to pass an act, approved by the governor in 1795, to sell the greater part of Georgia's territory presently comprising Alabama and Mississippi.[23]
+The state's western border runs in a straight line south-southeastward from a point southwest of Chattanooga, to meet the Chattahoochee River near West Point. It continues downriver to the point where it joins the Flint River (the confluence of the two forming Florida's Apalachicola River); the southern border goes almost due east and very slightly south, in a straight line to the St. Mary's River, which then forms the remainder of the boundary back to the ocean.[citation needed]
+The water boundaries are still set to be the original thalweg of the rivers. Since then, several have been inundated by lakes created by dams, including the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint point now under Lake Seminole.[citation needed]
+Georgia state legislators have claimed that in an 1818 survey the state's border with Tennessee was erroneously placed one mile (1.6 km) farther south than intended, and they still dispute it. Correction of this inaccuracy would allow Georgia access to water from the Tennessee River.[24]
+Each region has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the Ridge and Valley, which lies in the northwest corner of the state, includes limestone, sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, which have yielded construction-grade limestone, barite, ocher, and small amounts of coal.
+The state of Georgia has approximately 250 tree species and 58 protected plants. Georgia's native trees include red cedar, a variety of pines, oaks, hollies, cypress, sweetgum, scaly-bark and white hickories, and sabal palmetto. East Georgia is in the subtropical coniferous forest biome and conifer species as other broadleaf evergreen flora make up the majority of the southern and coastal regions. Yellow jasmine and mountain laurel make up just a few of the flowering shrubs in the state.
+White-tailed (Virginia) deer are in nearly all counties. The northern mockingbird and brown thrasher are among the 160 bird species that live in the state.[25]
+Reptiles include the eastern diamondback, copperhead, and cottonmouth snakes as well as alligators; amphibians include salamanders, frogs and toads. There are about 79 species of reptile and 63 amphibians known to live in Georgia.[25]
+The most popular freshwater game fish are trout, bream, bass, and catfish, all but the last of which are produced in state hatcheries for restocking. Popular saltwater game fish include red drum, spotted seatrout, flounder, and tarpon. Porpoises, whales, shrimp, oysters, and blue crabs are found inshore and offshore of the Georgia coast.[25]
+The majority of the state is primarily a humid subtropical climate. Hot and humid summers are typical, except at the highest elevations. The entire state, including the North Georgia mountains, receives moderate to heavy precipitation, which varies from 45 inches (1143 mm) in central Georgia[26] to approximately 75 inches (1905 mm) around the northeast part of the state.[27] The degree to which the weather of a certain region of Georgia is subtropical depends on the latitude, its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, and the elevation. The latter factor is felt chiefly in the mountainous areas of the northern part of the state, which are farther away from the ocean and can be 4500 feet (1350 m) above sea level. The USDA plant hardiness zones for Georgia range from zone 6b (no colder than −5 °F (−21 °C) ) in the Blue Ridge Mountains to zone 8b (no colder than 15 °F (−9 °C) ) along the Atlantic coast and Florida border.[28]
+The highest temperature ever recorded is 112 °F (44.4 °C) in Louisville on July 24, 1952,[29] while the lowest is −17 °F (−27.2 °C) in northern Floyd County on January 27, 1940.[30] Georgia is one of the leading states in frequency of tornadoes, though they are rarely stronger than EF1. Although tornadoes striking the city are very rare,[31] an EF2 tornado[31] hit downtown Atlanta on March 14, 2008, causing moderate to severe damage to various buildings. With a coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, Georgia is also vulnerable to hurricanes, although direct hurricane strikes were rare during the 20th century. Georgia often is affected by hurricanes that strike the Florida Panhandle, weaken over land, and bring strong tropical storm winds and heavy rain to the interior, a recent example being Hurricane Michael,[32] as well as hurricanes that come close to the Georgia coastline, brushing the coast on their way north without ever making landfall. Hurricane Matthew of 2016 and Hurricane Dorian of 2019 did just that.
+The United States Census Bureau estimates that in 2019 Georgia had a population of 10,617,423, which was an increase of 97,948 from the previous year, and an increase of 929,770 (9.60%) since 2010.[35] This includes a natural increase since the last census of 438,939 (849,414 births minus 410,475 deaths) and an increase from net migration of 606,673 people into the state. Immigration resulted in a net increase of 228,415 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 378,258 people.
+As of 2010[update], the number of illegal immigrants living in Georgia more than doubled to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009, according to a federal report. That gave Georgia the greatest percentage increase among the 10 states with the biggest illegal immigrant populations during those years.[36] Georgia has banned sanctuary cities.[37]
+There were 743,000 veterans in 2009.[38]
+According to the 2010 United States Census, Georgia had a population of 9,687,653. In terms of race and ethnicity, the state was 59.7% White (55.9% Non-Hispanic White alone), 30.5% Black or African American, 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.2% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 4.0% from some other race, and 2.1% from two or more races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up 8.8% of the population.[39]
+As of 2011[update], 58.8% of Georgia's population younger than age 1 were minorities (meaning they had at least one parent who was not non-Hispanic white) compared to other states like California with 75.1%, New York with 55.6%, and Texas with 69.8%.[43]
+The largest European ancestry groups are:
+In the 1980 census 1,584,303 Georgians claimed English ancestry out of a total state population of 3,994,817, making them 40% of the state, and the largest ethnic group at the time.[46] Today, many of these same people claiming they are of "American" ancestry are actually of English descent, and some are of Scots-Irish descent; however, their families have lived in the state for so long, in many cases since the colonial period, that they choose to identify simply as having "American" ancestry or do not in fact know their own ancestry. Their ancestry primarily goes back to the original thirteen colonies and for this reason many of them today simply claim "American" ancestry, though they are of predominantly English ancestry.[47][48][49][50]
+As of 2004[update], 7.7% of Georgia's population was reported as under 5 years of age, 26.4% under 18, and 9.6% were 65 or older. Also, as of 2004[update], females made up approximately 50.6% of the population and African Americans made up approximately 29.6%.
+Historically, about half of Georgia's population was composed of African Americans who, before the Civil War, were almost exclusively enslaved. The Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North from 1914 to 1970 reduced the African American population.[51]
+Georgia had the second-fastest-growing Asian population growth in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000, more than doubling in size during the ten-year period.[52] In addition, according to census estimates, Georgia ranks third among the states in terms of the percent of the total population that is African American (after Mississippi and Louisiana) and third in numeric Black population after New York and Florida.
+Georgia is the state with the third-lowest percentage of older people (65 or older), at 12.8 percent (as of 2015[update]).[53]
+The colonial settlement of large numbers of Scottish American, English American and Scotch-Irish Americans in the mountains and piedmont, and coastal settlement by some English Americans and African Americans, have strongly influenced the state's culture in food, language and music. The concentration of Africans imported to coastal areas in the 18th century repeatedly from rice-growing regions of West Africa led to the development of Gullah-Geechee language and culture in the Low Country among African Americans. They share a unique heritage in which African traditions of food, religion and culture were continued more than in some other areas. In the creolization of Southern culture, their foodways became an integral part of all Southern cooking in the Low Country.[54][55]
+As of 2010[update], 87.35% (7,666,663) of Georgia residents age 5 and older spoke English at home as a primary language, while 7.42% (651,583) spoke Spanish, 0.51% (44,702) Korean, 0.44% (38,244) Vietnamese, 0.42% (36,679) French, 0.38% (33,009) Chinese (which includes Mandarin), and German, which was spoken as a main language by 0.29% (23,351) of the population over the age of  5. In total, 12.65% (1,109,888) of Georgia's population age 5 and older spoke a mother language other than English.[56]
+Atlanta, located in north-central Georgia at the Eastern Continental Divide, has been Georgia's capital city since 1868. It is the most populous city in Georgia, with an estimated 2019 population of just over 506,000.[57]
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the cultural and economic center of the Southeast; its estimated population in 2019 was over 6 million, or 57% of Georgia's total. Atlanta is the nation's ninth largest metropolitan area.[58]
+The state has seventeen cities with populations above 50,000, based on 2019 U.S. Census estimates.[57]
+* In 2014, the City of Macon and most of unincorporated Bibb County officially merged. Macon joined Columbus, Augusta, Athens, Cusseta and Georgetown as consolidated city-county governments in Georgia.
+Along with the rest of the Southeast, Georgia's population continues to grow rapidly, with primary gains concentrated in urban areas. The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area added 1.23 million people (24 percent) between 2000 and 2010, and Atlanta rose in rank from the eleventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States to the ninth-largest.[59]
+The composition of religious affiliation in Georgia is 70% Protestant, 9% Catholic, 1% Mormon, 1% Jewish, 0.5% Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, and 0.5% Hindu. Atheists, deists, agnostics, and other unaffiliated people make up 13% of the population.[60] The largest Christian denominations by number of adherents in 2010 were the Southern Baptist Convention with 1,759,317; the United Methodist Church with 619,394; and the Roman Catholic Church with 596,384. Non-denominational Evangelical Protestant had 566,782 members, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) has 175,184 members, and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. has 172,982 members.[61] The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the largest Presbyterian body in the state, with 300 congregations and 100,000 members. The other large body, Presbyterian Church in America, had at its founding date 14 congregations and 2,800 members; in 2010 it counted 139 congregations and 32,000 members.[62][63] The Roman Catholic Church is noteworthy in Georgia's urban areas, and includes the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah. Georgia is home to the largest Hindu temple in the United States, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, located in the suburb city of Lilburn. Georgia is home to several historic synagogues including The Temple (Atlanta), Congregation Beth Jacob (Atlanta), and Congregation Mickve Israel (Savannah). Chabad and the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute are also active in the state.[64][65]
+As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Georgia's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power.[67] Executive authority in the state rests with the governor, currently Brian Kemp (Republican). Both the Governor of Georgia and lieutenant governor are elected on separate ballots to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the executive officials who comprise the governor's cabinet are elected by the citizens of Georgia rather than appointed by the governor.
+Legislative authority resides in the General Assembly, composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate, while members of the House of Representatives select their own Speaker. The Georgia Constitution mandates a maximum of 56 senators, elected from single-member districts, and a minimum of 180 representatives, apportioned among representative districts (which sometimes results in more than one representative per district); there are currently 56 senators and 180 representatives. The term of office for senators and representatives is two years.[68] The laws enacted by the General Assembly are codified in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.
+State judicial authority rests with the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, which have statewide authority.[69] In addition, there are smaller courts which have more limited geographical jurisdiction, including Superior Courts, State Courts, Juvenile Courts, Magistrate Courts and Probate Courts. Justices of the Supreme Court and judges of the Court of Appeals are elected statewide by the citizens in non-partisan elections to six-year terms. Judges for the smaller courts are elected to four-year terms by the state's citizens who live within that court's jurisdiction.
+Georgia consists of 159 counties, second only to Texas, with 254.[70] Georgia had 161 counties until the end of 1931, when Milton and Campbell were merged into the existing Fulton. Some counties have been named for prominent figures in both American and Georgian history, and many bear names with Native American origin. Counties in Georgia have their own elected legislative branch, usually called the Board of Commissioners, which usually also has executive authority in the county.[71] Several counties have a sole Commissioner form of government, with legislative and executive authority vested in a single person. Georgia is the only state with current Sole Commissioner counties. Georgia's Constitution provides all counties and cities with "home rule" authority. The county commissions have considerable power to pass legislation within their county, as a municipality would.
+Georgia recognizes all local units of government as cities, so every incorporated town is legally a city. Georgia does not provide for townships or independent cities, though there have been bills proposed in the Legislature to provide for townships;[72] it does allow consolidated city-county governments by local referendum. All of Georgia's second-tier cities except Savannah have now formed consolidated city-county governments by referendum: Columbus (in 1970), Athens (1990), Augusta (1995), and Macon (2012). (Augusta and Athens have excluded one or more small, incorporated towns within their consolidated boundaries; Columbus and Macon eventually absorbed all smaller incorporated entities within their consolidated boundaries.) The small town of Cusseta adopted a consolidated city-county government after it merged with unincorporated Chattahoochee County in 2003. Three years later, in 2006, the town of Georgetown consolidated with the rest of Quitman County.
+There is no true metropolitan government in Georgia, though the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and Georgia Regional Transportation Authority do provide some services, and the ARC must approve all major land development projects in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
+Georgia has voted Republican in six consecutive presidential elections since 1996.
+Until 1964, Georgia's state government had the longest unbroken record of single-party dominance, by the Democratic Party, of any state in the Union. This record was established largely due to the disenfranchisement of most blacks and many poor whites by the state in its constitution and laws in the early 20th century. Some elements, such as requiring payment of poll taxes and passing literacy tests, prevented blacks from registering to vote; their exclusion from the political system lasted into the 1960s and reduced the Republican Party to a non-competitive status in the early 20th century.[73]
+White Democrats regained power after Reconstruction due in part to the efforts of some using intimidation and violence, but this method came into disrepute.[74] In 1900, shortly before Georgia adopted a disfranchising constitutional amendment in 1908, blacks comprised 47% of the state's population.[75]
+The whites dealt with this problem of potential political power by the 1908 amendment, which in practice disenfranchised blacks and poor whites, nearly half of the state population. It required that any male at least 21 years of age wanting to register to vote must also: (a) be of good character and able to pass a test on citizenship, (b) be able to read and write provisions of the U.S. and Georgia constitutions, or (c) own at least 40 acres of land or $500 in property. Any Georgian who had fought in any war from the American Revolution through the Spanish–American War was exempted from these additional qualifications. More importantly, any Georgian descended from a veteran of any of these wars also was exempted. Because by 1908 many white Georgia males were grandsons of veterans and/or owned the required property, the exemption and the property requirement basically allowed only well-to-do whites to vote. The qualifications of good character, citizenship knowledge, and literacy (all determined subjectively by white registrars), and property ownership were used to disqualify most blacks and poor whites, preventing them from registering to vote. The voter rolls dropped dramatically.[74][76] In the early 20th century, Progressives promoted electoral reform and reducing the power of ward bosses to clean up politics. Their additional rules, such as the eight-box law, continued to effectively close out people who were illiterate.[17] White, one-party rule was solidified.
+For more than 130 years, from 1872 to 2003, Georgians nominated and elected only white Democratic governors, and white Democrats held the majority of seats in the General Assembly.[77] Most of the Democrats elected throughout these years were Southern Democrats, who were fiscally and socially conservative by national standards.[78][79] This voting pattern continued after the segregationist period.[80]
+Legal segregation was ended by passage of federal legislation in the 1960s. According to the 1960 census, the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American was 28%; hundreds of thousands of blacks had left the state in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. New white residents arrived through migration and immigration. Following support from the national Democratic Party for the civil rights movement and especially civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, most African-American voters, as well as other minority voters, have largely supported the Democratic Party in Georgia.[81] In the decades since the late 20th century, the conservative white-majority voters have increasingly supported Republicans for national and state offices.
+In 2002, incumbent moderate Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was defeated by Republican Sonny Perdue, a state legislator and former Democrat. While Democrats retained control of the State House, they lost their majority in the Senate when four Democrats switched parties. They lost the House in the 2004 election. Republicans then controlled all three partisan elements of the state government.
+Even before 2002, the state had become increasingly supportive of Republicans in Presidential elections. It has supported a Democrat for president only three times since 1960. In 1976 and 1980, native son Jimmy Carter carried the state; in 1992, the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton narrowly won the state. Generally, Republicans are strongest in the predominantly white suburban (especially the Atlanta suburbs) and rural portions of the state.[82] Many of these areas were represented by conservative Democrats in the state legislature well into the 21st century. One of the most conservative of these was U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald, former head of the John Birch Society, who died when the Soviet Union shot down KAL 007 near Sakhalin Island. Democratic candidates have tended to win a higher percentage of the vote in the areas where black voters are most numerous,[82] as well as in the cities among liberal urban populations (especially Atlanta and Athens), and the central and southwestern portion of the state.
+The ascendancy of the Republican Party in Georgia and in the South in general resulted in Georgia U.S. House of Representatives member Newt Gingrich being elected as Speaker of the House following the election of a Republican majority in the House in 1994. Gingrich served as Speaker until 1999, when he resigned in the aftermath of the loss of House seats held by members of the GOP. Gingrich mounted an unsuccessful bid for president in the 2012 election, but withdrew after winning only the South Carolina and Georgia primaries.
+In 2008, Democrat Jim Martin ran against incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss failed to acquire the necessary 50 percent of votes due to a Libertarian Party candidate receiving the remainder of votes. In the runoff election held on December 2, 2008, Chambliss became the second Georgia Republican to be reelected to the U.S. Senate.
+In the 2018 elections, the governor remained a Republican (by 54,723 votes against a democratic black female, Stacey Abrams), Republicans lost eight seats in the Georgia House of Representatives (winning 106), while Democrats gained ten (winning 74), Republicans lost two seats in the Georgia Senate (winning 35 seats), while Democrats gained two seats (winning 21), and five Democrat U.S. Representatives were elected with Republicans winning nine seats (one winning with just 419 votes over the Democratic challenger, and one seat being lost).[83][84][85]
+In the last three presidential elections as of 2018, the Republican candidate has won Georgia by approximately five to eight points over the Democratic nominee, at least once for each election being narrower than margins recorded in some states that have flipped within that timeframe, such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Therefore, it could potentially be regarded as a swing state in future elections should voter preferences only shift slightly.
+During the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia made significant changes in civil rights and governance. As in many other states, its legislature had not reapportioned congressional districts according to population from 1931 to after the 1960 census. Problems of malapportionment in the state legislature, where rural districts had outsize power in relation to urban districts, such as Atlanta's, were corrected after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). The court ruled that congressional districts had to be reapportioned to have essentially equal populations.
+A related case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), required state legislatures to end their use of geographical districts or counties in favor of "one man, one vote"; that is, districts based upon approximately equal populations, to be reviewed and changed as necessary after each census. These changes resulted in residents of Atlanta and other urban areas gaining political power in Georgia in proportion to their populations.[86] From the mid-1960s, the voting electorate increased after African Americans' rights to vote were enforced under civil rights law.
+Economic growth through this period was dominated by Atlanta and its region. It was a bedrock of the emerging "New South". From the late 20th century, Atlanta attracted headquarters and relocated workers of national companies, becoming more diverse, liberal and cosmopolitan than many areas of the state.
+In the 21st century, many conservative Democrats, including former U.S. Senator and governor Zell Miller, decided to support Republicans. The state's socially conservative bent results in wide support for such measures as restrictions on abortion. In 2004, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages was approved by 76% of voters.[87] However, after the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, all Georgia counties came into full compliance, recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state.[88]
+Georgia's 2018 total gross state product was $602 billion.[89] For years Georgia as a state has had the highest credit rating by Standard & Poor's (AAA) and is one of only 15 states with a AAA rating.[90] If Georgia were a stand-alone country, it would be the 28th largest economy in the world, based on data from 2005.[91]
+There are 17 Fortune 500 companies and 26 Fortune 1000 companies with headquarters in Georgia, including Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, TSYS, Delta Air Lines, Aflac, Southern Company, Anthem Inc., and SunTrust Banks.
+Atlanta boasts the world's busiest airport, as measured both by passenger traffic and by aircraft traffic.[93][94] Also, the Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport and fastest-growing container seaport in North America, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95]
+Atlanta has a large effect on the state of Georgia, the Southeastern United States, and beyond. Atlanta has been the site of growth in finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, service, logistics, transportation, film, communications, convention and trade show businesses and industries, while tourism is important to the economy. Atlanta is a global city, also called world city or sometimes alpha city or world center, as a city generally considered to be an important node in the global economic system.
+For the five years through November 2017, Georgia has been ranked the top state (number 1) in the nation to do business, and has been recognized as number 1 for business and labor climate in the nation, number 1 in business climate in the nation, number 1 in the nation in workforce training and as having a "Best in Class" state economic development agency.[96][97]
+In 2016, Georgia had median annual income per person of between $50,000 and $59,999, which is in inflation-adjusted dollars for 2016. The U.S. median annual income for the entire nation is $57,617. This lies within the range of Georgia's median annual income.[98]
+Widespread farms produce peanuts, corn, and soybeans across middle and south Georgia. The state is the number one producer of pecans in the world, with the region around Albany in southwest Georgia being the center of Georgia's pecan production. Gainesville in northeast Georgia touts itself as the Poultry Capital of the World. Georgia is in the top five blueberry producers in the United States.[99]
+Major products in the mineral industry include a variety of clays, stones, sands and the clay palygorskite, known as attapulgite.
+While many textile jobs moved overseas, there is still a textile industry located around the cities of Rome, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and along the I-75 corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Historically it started along the fall line in the Piedmont, where factories were powered by waterfalls and rivers. It includes the towns of Cartersville, Calhoun, Ringgold and Dalton[100]
+In November 2009, Kia started production in Georgia at the first U.S. Kia Motors plant, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia in West Point.
+Industrial products include textiles and apparel, transportation equipment, food processing, paper products, chemicals and products, and electric equipment.
+Georgia was ranked the number 2 state for infrastructure and global access by Area Development magazine.[101]
+The Georgia Ports Authority owns and operates four ports in the state: Port of Savannah, Port of Brunswick, Port Bainbridge, and Port Columbus. The Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport in the United States, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95] The Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal is the largest single container terminal in North America.[102] Several major companies including Target, IKEA, and Heineken operate distribution centers in close proximity to the Port of Savannah.
+Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport moves over 650,000 tons of cargo annually through three cargo complexes (two million square feet of floor space). It has nearby cold storage for perishables; it is the only airport in the Southeast with USDA-approved cold-treatment capabilities. Delta Air Lines also offers an on-airport refrigeration facility for perishable cargo, and a 250-acre Foreign Trade Zone is located at the airport.[103]
+Georgia is a major railway hub, has the most extensive rail system in the Southeast, and has the service of two Class I railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, plus 24 short-line railroads. Georgia is ranked the #3 state in the nation for rail accessibility. Rail shipments include intermodal, bulk, automotive and every other type of shipment.[104]
+Georgia has an extensive interstate highway system including 1,200 miles of interstate highway and 20,000 miles of federal and state highways that facilitate the efficient movement of more than $620 billion of cargo by truck each year. Georgia's six interstates connect to 80 percent of the U.S. population within a two-day truck drive. More than $14 billion in funding has been approved[when?] for new roadway infrastructure.[105]
+Southern Congressmen have attracted major investment by the U.S. military in the state. The several installations include Moody Air Force Base, Fort Stewart, Hunter Army Airfield, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Fort Benning, Robins Air Force Base, Fort Gordon, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Coast Guard Air Station Savannah and Coast Guard Station Brunswick. These installations command numerous jobs and business for related contractors.
+Georgia's electricity generation and consumption are among the highest in the United States, with natural gas being the primary electrical generation fuel, followed by coal. The state also has two nuclear power facilities, Plant Hatch and Plant Vogtle, which contribute almost one fourth of Georgia's electricity generation, and an additional two nuclear power plants are under construction[when?] at Plant Vogtle. In 2013, the generation mix was 39% gas, 35% coal, 23% nuclear, 3% hydro and other renewable sources. The leading area of energy consumption is the industrial sector because Georgia "is a leader in the energy-intensive wood and paper products industry".[106] Solar generated energy is becoming more in use with solar energy generators currently installed ranking Georgia 15th in the country in installed solar capacity. In 2013, $189 million was invested in Georgia to install solar for home, business and utility use representing a 795% increase over the previous year.[107]
+Georgia has a progressive income tax structure with six brackets of state income tax rates that range from 1% to 6%. In 2009, Georgians paid 9% of their income in state and local taxes, compared to the U.S. average of 9.8% of income.[108] This ranks Georgia 25th among the states for total state and local tax burden.[108] The state sales tax in Georgia is 4%[109] with additional percentages added through local options (e.g. special-purpose local-option sales tax or SPLOST), but there is no sales tax on prescription drugs, certain medical devices, or food items for home consumption.[110]
+The state legislature may allow municipalities to institute local sales taxes and special local taxes, such as the 2% SPLOST tax and the 1% sales tax for MARTA serviced counties. Excise taxes are levied on alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel. Owners of real property in Georgia pay property tax to their county. All taxes are collected by the Georgia Department of Revenue and then properly distributed according to any agreements that each county has with its cities.
+The Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office promotes filming in the state.[111] Since 1972, seven hundred film and television projects have been filmed on location in Georgia.[112] Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state location with the most feature films produced. In FY2017, film and television production in Georgia had an economic impact of $9.5 billion.[113] Atlanta now is even called the "Hollywood of the South".[114] Television shows like Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are filmed in the state.[115] Movies too, such as Passengers, Forrest Gump, Contagion, Hidden Figures, Sully, Baby Driver, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Birds of Prey and many more, were filmed around Georgia.[116][117]
+In the Atlanta area, World of Coke, Georgia Aquarium, Zoo Atlanta and Stone Mountain are important tourist attractions.[118][119] Stone Mountain is Georgia's "most popular attraction"; receiving more than four million tourists per year.[120][121] The Georgia Aquarium, in Atlanta, was the largest aquarium in the world in 2010 according to Guinness World Records.[122]
+Callaway Gardens, in western Georgia, is a family resort.[123] The area is also popular with golfers.
+The Savannah Historic District attracts more than eleven million tourists each year.[124]
+The Golden Isles is a string of barrier islands off the Atlantic coast of Georgia near Brunswick that includes beaches, golf courses and the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
+Several sites honor the lives and careers of noted American leaders: the Little White House in Warm Springs, which served as the summer residence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he was being treated for polio; President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains and the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta; the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta, which is the final resting place of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King; and Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King preached.
+Georgia's major fine art museums include the High Museum of Art and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, both in Atlanta; the Georgia Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens; Telfair Museum of Art and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah; and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta.[125]
+The state theatre of Georgia is the Springer Opera House located in Columbus.
+The Atlanta Opera brings opera to Georgia stages.[126] The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the most widely recognized orchestra and largest arts organization in the southeastern United States.[127]
+There are a number of performing arts venues in the state, among the largest are the Fox Theatre, and the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, both on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta as well as the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, located in Northwest Atlanta.
+Authors have grappled with Georgia's complex history. Popular novels related to this include Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
+A number of noted authors, poets and playwrights have lived in Georgia, such as James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, Sidney Lanier, Frank Yerby and Lewis Grizzard.[128]
+Well-known television shows set in Atlanta include, from Tyler Perry Studios, House of Payne and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the CBS sitcom Designing Women, Matlock, the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva, Rectify and numerous HGTV original productions.
+The Dukes of Hazzard, a 1980s TV show, was set in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia. The first five episodes were shot on location in Conyers and Covington, Georgia as well as some locations in Atlanta. Production was then moved to Burbank, California.[citation needed]
+Also filmed in Georgia is The Vampire Diaries, using Covington as the setting for the fictional Mystic Falls.
+A number of notable musicians in various genres of popular music are from Georgia. Among them are Ray Charles (whose many hits include "Georgia on My Mind", now the official state song), and Gladys Knight (known for her Georgia-themed song, "Midnight Train to Georgia").
+Rock groups from Georgia include the Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Black Crowes, and The Allman Brothers.
+The university city of Athens sparked an influential rock music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Among the groups achieving their initial prominence there were R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and the B-52's.
+Since the 1990s, various hip-hop and R&B musicians have included top-selling artists such as Outkast, Usher, Ludacris, TLC, B.o.B., and Ciara. Atlanta is mentioned in a number of these artists' tracks, such as Usher's "A-Town Down" reference in his 2004 hit "Yeah!" (which also features Atlanta artists Lil Jon and Ludacris), Ludacris' "Welcome to Atlanta", Outkast's album "ATLiens", and B.o.B.'s multiple references to Decatur, Georgia, as in his hit song "Strange Clouds".
+Two movies, both set in Atlanta, won Oscars for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Other films set in Georgia include Deliverance (1972), Parental Guidance (2012), and Vacation.
+Sports in Georgia include professional teams in nearly all major sports, Olympic Games contenders and medalists, collegiate teams in major and small-school conferences and associations, and active amateur teams and individual sports. The state of Georgia has teams in four major professional leagues—the Atlanta Braves of Major League Baseball, the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League, the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association, and Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer.
+The Georgia Bulldogs (Southeastern Conference), Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Atlantic Coast Conference), Georgia State Panthers and Georgia Southern Eagles (Sun Belt Conference) are Georgia's NCAA Division I FBS football teams, having won multiple national championships between them. The Georgia Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets have a historical rivalry in college football known as Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, and the Georgia State Panthers and the Georgia Southern Eagles have recently developed their own rivalry.
+The 1996 Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta. The stadium that was built to host various Olympic events was converted to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves through 2016.
+The Masters golf tournament, the first of the PGA tour's four "majors", is held annually the second weekend of April at the Augusta National Golf Club.
+The Atlanta Motor Speedway hosts the Dixie 500 NASCAR Cup Series stock car race and Road Atlanta the Petit Le Mans endurance sports car race.
+Atlanta's Georgia Dome hosted Super Bowl XXVIII in 1994 and Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. The Georgia Dome hosted the NCAA Final Four Men's Basketball National Championship in 2002, 2007, and 2013.[129]
+It hosted WWE's WrestleMania XXVII in 2011, an event which set an attendance record of 71,617. The dome was also the venue of the annual Chick-fil-A Bowl post-season college football games. Since 2017, they have been held at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium along with the FIRST World Championships.
+Professional baseball's Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was from Narrows and was nicknamed the "Georgia Peach".[130]
+There are 48 state parks, 15 historic sites, and numerous wildlife preserves under supervision of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.[131] Other historic sites and parks are supervised by the National Park Service and include the Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville; Appalachian National Scenic Trail; Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area near Atlanta; Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park at Fort Oglethorpe; Cumberland Island National Seashore near St. Marys; Fort Frederica National Monument on St. Simons Island; Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah; Jimmy Carter National Historic Site near Plains; Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park near Kennesaw; Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta; Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon; Trail of Tears National Historic Trail; and the Okefenokee Swamp in Waycross, Georgia[132]
+Outdoor recreational activities include hiking along the Appalachian Trail; Civil War Heritage Trails; rock climbing and whitewater kayaking.[133][134][135][136] Other outdoor activities include hunting and fishing.
+Georgia county and city public school systems are administered by school boards with members elected at the local level. As of 2013[update], all but 19 of 181 boards are elected from single-member districts. Residents and activist groups in Fayette County, Georgia sued the board of commissioners and school board for maintaining an election system based on at-large voting, which tended to increase the power of the majority and effectively prevented minority participation on elected local boards for nearly 200 years.[137] A change to single-member districts has resulted in the African-American minority being able to elect representatives of its choice.
+Georgia high schools (grades nine through twelve) are required to administer a standardized, multiple choice End of Course Test, or EOCT, in each of eight core subjects: algebra, geometry, U.S. history, economics, biology, physical science, ninth grade literature and composition, and American literature. The official purpose of the tests is to assess "specific content knowledge and skills". Although a minimum test score is not required for the student to receive credit in the course, completion of the test is mandatory. The EOCT score accounts for 15% of a student's grade in the course.[138] The Georgia Milestone evaluation is taken by public school students in the state.[139]
+Georgia has 85 public colleges, universities, and technical colleges in addition to more than 45 private institutes of higher learning. Among Georgia's public universities is the flagship research university, the University of Georgia, founded in 1785 as the country's oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education.[140] The University System of Georgia is the presiding body over public post-secondary education in the state. The System includes 29 institutions of higher learning and is governed by the Georgia Board of Regents. Georgia's workforce of more than 6.3 million is constantly refreshed by the growing number of people who move there along with the 90,000 graduates from the universities, colleges and technical colleges across the state, including the highly ranked University of Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University and Emory University.[141]
+The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, is available to all Georgia residents who have graduated from high school or earned a General Educational Development certificate. The student must maintain a 3.2 or higher grade point average and attend a public college or university in the state.
+The Georgia Historical Society, an independent educational and research institution, has a research center located in Savannah. The research center's library and archives hold the oldest collection of materials related to Georgia history in the nation.
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the ninth largest media market in the United States as ranked by Nielsen Media Research. The state's other top markets are Savannah (95th largest), Augusta (115th largest), and Columbus (127th largest).[142]
+There are 48 television broadcast stations in Georgia including TBS, TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, CNN and Headline News, all founded by notable Georgia resident Ted Turner. The Weather Channel also has its headquarters in Atlanta.
+By far, the largest daily newspaper in Georgia is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a daily readership of 195,592 and a Sunday readership of 397,925.[143][144] Other large dailies include The Augusta Chronicle, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, The Telegraph (formerly The Macon Telegraph) and the Savannah Morning News.
+WSB-AM in Atlanta was the first licensed radio station in the southeastern United States, signing on in 1922. Georgia Public Radio has been in service since 1984[145][146] and, with the exception of Atlanta, it broadcasts daily on several FM (and one AM) stations across the state. Georgia Public Radio reaches nearly all of Georgia (with the exception of the Atlanta area, which is served by WABE).
+WSB-TV in Atlanta is the state's oldest television station, having begun operations in 1948. WSB was only the second such operation founded in the Southern U.S., trailing only WTVR in Richmond, Virginia.[citation needed]
+Transportation in Georgia is overseen by the Georgia Department of Transportation, a part of the executive branch of the state government. Georgia's major Interstate Highways are I-20, I-75, I-85, and I-95. On March 18, 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution naming the portion of Interstate Highway 75, which runs from the Chattahoochee River northward to the Tennessee state line the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway. Larry McDonald, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, had been on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983.
+Georgia's primary commercial airport is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), the world's busiest airport.[147] In addition to Hartsfield–Jackson, there are eight other airports serving major commercial traffic in Georgia. Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport is the second-busiest airport in the state as measured by passengers served, and is the only additional international airport. Other commercial airports (ranked in order of passengers served) are located in Augusta, Columbus, Albany, Macon, Brunswick, Valdosta, and Athens.[148]
+The Georgia Ports Authority manages two deepwater seaports, at Savannah and Brunswick, and two river ports, at Bainbridge and Columbus. The Port of Savannah is a major U.S. seaport on the Atlantic coast.
+The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the principal rapid transit system in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Formed in 1971 as strictly a bus system, MARTA operates a network of bus routes linked to a rapid transit system consisting of 48 miles (77 km) of rail track with 38 train stations. MARTA operates almost exclusively in Fulton and DeKalb counties, with bus service to two destinations in Cobb county and the Cumberland Transfer Center next to the Cumberland Mall, and a single rail station in Clayton County at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. MARTA also operates a separate paratransit service for disabled customers. As of 2009[update], the average total daily ridership for the system (bus and rail) was 482,500 passengers.[149]
+The state has 151 general hospitals, more than 15,000 doctors and almost 6,000 dentists.[150] The state is ranked forty-first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise.[151]
+Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Georgia, was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929. He was a civil rights movement leader fighting for rights for African Americans and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.[152] Mordecai Sheftall, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the American Revolution, was born and lived his life in Georgia.[153]
+Reference: Georgia Symbols[154]
+Coordinates: 33°00′N 83°30′W / 33°N 83.5°W / 33; -83.5

en/2189.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

+Georgia (/ˈdʒɔːrdʒə/) is a state in the Southeastern Region of the United States. Georgia is the 24th-largest in area and 8th most populous of the 50 United States. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, and to the west by Alabama. Its 2019 estimated population was 10,617,423, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.[4] Atlanta, a "beta(+)" global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with an estimated population of more than 6 million people in 2019,[5] is the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population.
+Founded in 1733 as a British colony, Georgia was the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established.[6] Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Colony of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.[7] From 1802 to 1804, western Georgia was split to form the Mississippi Territory, which later was admitted as the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, and was one of the original seven Confederate States.[7] Following the Civil War, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870.[7] In the post-Reconstruction era, Georgia's economy was transformed as a group of prominent politicians, businessmen, and journalists, led by Henry W. Grady, espoused the "New South" philosophy of sectional reconciliation, industrialization, and white supremacy.[8] During the 20th century, several Georgians, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., were prominent leaders during the civil rights movement.[7] Since 1945, Georgia has seen substantial population growth as part of the broader Sun Belt phenomenon. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing.[9]
+Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. The state's northernmost regions include the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the larger Appalachian Mountain system. The Piedmont plateau extends from the foothills of the Blue Ridge south to the Fall Line, an escarpment to the coastal plain defining the state's southern region. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet (1,458 m) above sea level; the lowest is the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of some high-altitude areas in the Blue Ridge, the entirety of the state has a humid subtropical climate. Of the states entirely east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area.[10]
+Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures. The British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733.[11] The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by (and named for) King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king.[12]
+The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778,[13] and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.
+In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
+In early 1861, Georgia joined the Confederacy (with secessionists having a slight majority of delegates)[14] and became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service, roughly one of every five who served.[15] In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union.
+With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering.[16] In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude blacks from politics.[17] They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration.[18] According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States (1877-1950), Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male.[19] Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
+An Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South.
+On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.[20]
+By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some in-migration by whites.[21] With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a noted civil rights leader, was elected to the state House in 1965, and served multiple terms there and in the state senate.
+Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration to ensure the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, earned admiration by writing in support of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972 Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since Reconstruction.
+In 1980, construction was completed on an expansion of what is now named Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). The busiest and most efficient airport in the world, it accommodates more than a hundred million passengers annually.[22] Employing more than 60,000 people, the airport became a major engine for economic growth.[22] With the advantages of cheap real estate, low taxes, right-to-work laws and a regulatory environment limiting government interference, the Atlanta metropolitan area became a national center of finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, logistics, and transportation companies, as well as the film, convention, and trade show businesses. As a testament to the city's growing international profile, in 1990 the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of Atlanta's status as a transportation hub, in 1991 UPS established its headquarters in a suburb. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York or Chicago.
+Beginning from the Atlantic Ocean, the state's eastern border with South Carolina runs up the Savannah River, northwest to its origin at the confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers. It then continues up the Tugaloo (originally Tugalo) and into the Chattooga River, its most significant tributary. These bounds were decided in the 1797 Treaty of Beaufort, and tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in the two Georgia v. South Carolina cases in 1923 and 1989.[citation needed]
+The border then takes a sharp turn around the tip of Rabun County, at latitude 35°N, though from this point it diverges slightly south (due to inaccuracies in the original survey). This northern border was originally the Georgia and North Carolina border all the way to the Mississippi River, until Tennessee was divided from North Carolina, and the Yazoo companies induced the legislature of Georgia to pass an act, approved by the governor in 1795, to sell the greater part of Georgia's territory presently comprising Alabama and Mississippi.[23]
+The state's western border runs in a straight line south-southeastward from a point southwest of Chattanooga, to meet the Chattahoochee River near West Point. It continues downriver to the point where it joins the Flint River (the confluence of the two forming Florida's Apalachicola River); the southern border goes almost due east and very slightly south, in a straight line to the St. Mary's River, which then forms the remainder of the boundary back to the ocean.[citation needed]
+The water boundaries are still set to be the original thalweg of the rivers. Since then, several have been inundated by lakes created by dams, including the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint point now under Lake Seminole.[citation needed]
+Georgia state legislators have claimed that in an 1818 survey the state's border with Tennessee was erroneously placed one mile (1.6 km) farther south than intended, and they still dispute it. Correction of this inaccuracy would allow Georgia access to water from the Tennessee River.[24]
+Each region has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the Ridge and Valley, which lies in the northwest corner of the state, includes limestone, sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, which have yielded construction-grade limestone, barite, ocher, and small amounts of coal.
+The state of Georgia has approximately 250 tree species and 58 protected plants. Georgia's native trees include red cedar, a variety of pines, oaks, hollies, cypress, sweetgum, scaly-bark and white hickories, and sabal palmetto. East Georgia is in the subtropical coniferous forest biome and conifer species as other broadleaf evergreen flora make up the majority of the southern and coastal regions. Yellow jasmine and mountain laurel make up just a few of the flowering shrubs in the state.
+White-tailed (Virginia) deer are in nearly all counties. The northern mockingbird and brown thrasher are among the 160 bird species that live in the state.[25]
+Reptiles include the eastern diamondback, copperhead, and cottonmouth snakes as well as alligators; amphibians include salamanders, frogs and toads. There are about 79 species of reptile and 63 amphibians known to live in Georgia.[25]
+The most popular freshwater game fish are trout, bream, bass, and catfish, all but the last of which are produced in state hatcheries for restocking. Popular saltwater game fish include red drum, spotted seatrout, flounder, and tarpon. Porpoises, whales, shrimp, oysters, and blue crabs are found inshore and offshore of the Georgia coast.[25]
+The majority of the state is primarily a humid subtropical climate. Hot and humid summers are typical, except at the highest elevations. The entire state, including the North Georgia mountains, receives moderate to heavy precipitation, which varies from 45 inches (1143 mm) in central Georgia[26] to approximately 75 inches (1905 mm) around the northeast part of the state.[27] The degree to which the weather of a certain region of Georgia is subtropical depends on the latitude, its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, and the elevation. The latter factor is felt chiefly in the mountainous areas of the northern part of the state, which are farther away from the ocean and can be 4500 feet (1350 m) above sea level. The USDA plant hardiness zones for Georgia range from zone 6b (no colder than −5 °F (−21 °C) ) in the Blue Ridge Mountains to zone 8b (no colder than 15 °F (−9 °C) ) along the Atlantic coast and Florida border.[28]
+The highest temperature ever recorded is 112 °F (44.4 °C) in Louisville on July 24, 1952,[29] while the lowest is −17 °F (−27.2 °C) in northern Floyd County on January 27, 1940.[30] Georgia is one of the leading states in frequency of tornadoes, though they are rarely stronger than EF1. Although tornadoes striking the city are very rare,[31] an EF2 tornado[31] hit downtown Atlanta on March 14, 2008, causing moderate to severe damage to various buildings. With a coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, Georgia is also vulnerable to hurricanes, although direct hurricane strikes were rare during the 20th century. Georgia often is affected by hurricanes that strike the Florida Panhandle, weaken over land, and bring strong tropical storm winds and heavy rain to the interior, a recent example being Hurricane Michael,[32] as well as hurricanes that come close to the Georgia coastline, brushing the coast on their way north without ever making landfall. Hurricane Matthew of 2016 and Hurricane Dorian of 2019 did just that.
+The United States Census Bureau estimates that in 2019 Georgia had a population of 10,617,423, which was an increase of 97,948 from the previous year, and an increase of 929,770 (9.60%) since 2010.[35] This includes a natural increase since the last census of 438,939 (849,414 births minus 410,475 deaths) and an increase from net migration of 606,673 people into the state. Immigration resulted in a net increase of 228,415 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 378,258 people.
+As of 2010[update], the number of illegal immigrants living in Georgia more than doubled to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009, according to a federal report. That gave Georgia the greatest percentage increase among the 10 states with the biggest illegal immigrant populations during those years.[36] Georgia has banned sanctuary cities.[37]
+There were 743,000 veterans in 2009.[38]
+According to the 2010 United States Census, Georgia had a population of 9,687,653. In terms of race and ethnicity, the state was 59.7% White (55.9% Non-Hispanic White alone), 30.5% Black or African American, 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.2% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 4.0% from some other race, and 2.1% from two or more races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up 8.8% of the population.[39]
+As of 2011[update], 58.8% of Georgia's population younger than age 1 were minorities (meaning they had at least one parent who was not non-Hispanic white) compared to other states like California with 75.1%, New York with 55.6%, and Texas with 69.8%.[43]
+The largest European ancestry groups are:
+In the 1980 census 1,584,303 Georgians claimed English ancestry out of a total state population of 3,994,817, making them 40% of the state, and the largest ethnic group at the time.[46] Today, many of these same people claiming they are of "American" ancestry are actually of English descent, and some are of Scots-Irish descent; however, their families have lived in the state for so long, in many cases since the colonial period, that they choose to identify simply as having "American" ancestry or do not in fact know their own ancestry. Their ancestry primarily goes back to the original thirteen colonies and for this reason many of them today simply claim "American" ancestry, though they are of predominantly English ancestry.[47][48][49][50]
+As of 2004[update], 7.7% of Georgia's population was reported as under 5 years of age, 26.4% under 18, and 9.6% were 65 or older. Also, as of 2004[update], females made up approximately 50.6% of the population and African Americans made up approximately 29.6%.
+Historically, about half of Georgia's population was composed of African Americans who, before the Civil War, were almost exclusively enslaved. The Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North from 1914 to 1970 reduced the African American population.[51]
+Georgia had the second-fastest-growing Asian population growth in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000, more than doubling in size during the ten-year period.[52] In addition, according to census estimates, Georgia ranks third among the states in terms of the percent of the total population that is African American (after Mississippi and Louisiana) and third in numeric Black population after New York and Florida.
+Georgia is the state with the third-lowest percentage of older people (65 or older), at 12.8 percent (as of 2015[update]).[53]
+The colonial settlement of large numbers of Scottish American, English American and Scotch-Irish Americans in the mountains and piedmont, and coastal settlement by some English Americans and African Americans, have strongly influenced the state's culture in food, language and music. The concentration of Africans imported to coastal areas in the 18th century repeatedly from rice-growing regions of West Africa led to the development of Gullah-Geechee language and culture in the Low Country among African Americans. They share a unique heritage in which African traditions of food, religion and culture were continued more than in some other areas. In the creolization of Southern culture, their foodways became an integral part of all Southern cooking in the Low Country.[54][55]
+As of 2010[update], 87.35% (7,666,663) of Georgia residents age 5 and older spoke English at home as a primary language, while 7.42% (651,583) spoke Spanish, 0.51% (44,702) Korean, 0.44% (38,244) Vietnamese, 0.42% (36,679) French, 0.38% (33,009) Chinese (which includes Mandarin), and German, which was spoken as a main language by 0.29% (23,351) of the population over the age of  5. In total, 12.65% (1,109,888) of Georgia's population age 5 and older spoke a mother language other than English.[56]
+Atlanta, located in north-central Georgia at the Eastern Continental Divide, has been Georgia's capital city since 1868. It is the most populous city in Georgia, with an estimated 2019 population of just over 506,000.[57]
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the cultural and economic center of the Southeast; its estimated population in 2019 was over 6 million, or 57% of Georgia's total. Atlanta is the nation's ninth largest metropolitan area.[58]
+The state has seventeen cities with populations above 50,000, based on 2019 U.S. Census estimates.[57]
+* In 2014, the City of Macon and most of unincorporated Bibb County officially merged. Macon joined Columbus, Augusta, Athens, Cusseta and Georgetown as consolidated city-county governments in Georgia.
+Along with the rest of the Southeast, Georgia's population continues to grow rapidly, with primary gains concentrated in urban areas. The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area added 1.23 million people (24 percent) between 2000 and 2010, and Atlanta rose in rank from the eleventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States to the ninth-largest.[59]
+The composition of religious affiliation in Georgia is 70% Protestant, 9% Catholic, 1% Mormon, 1% Jewish, 0.5% Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, and 0.5% Hindu. Atheists, deists, agnostics, and other unaffiliated people make up 13% of the population.[60] The largest Christian denominations by number of adherents in 2010 were the Southern Baptist Convention with 1,759,317; the United Methodist Church with 619,394; and the Roman Catholic Church with 596,384. Non-denominational Evangelical Protestant had 566,782 members, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) has 175,184 members, and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. has 172,982 members.[61] The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the largest Presbyterian body in the state, with 300 congregations and 100,000 members. The other large body, Presbyterian Church in America, had at its founding date 14 congregations and 2,800 members; in 2010 it counted 139 congregations and 32,000 members.[62][63] The Roman Catholic Church is noteworthy in Georgia's urban areas, and includes the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah. Georgia is home to the largest Hindu temple in the United States, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, located in the suburb city of Lilburn. Georgia is home to several historic synagogues including The Temple (Atlanta), Congregation Beth Jacob (Atlanta), and Congregation Mickve Israel (Savannah). Chabad and the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute are also active in the state.[64][65]
+As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Georgia's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power.[67] Executive authority in the state rests with the governor, currently Brian Kemp (Republican). Both the Governor of Georgia and lieutenant governor are elected on separate ballots to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the executive officials who comprise the governor's cabinet are elected by the citizens of Georgia rather than appointed by the governor.
+Legislative authority resides in the General Assembly, composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate, while members of the House of Representatives select their own Speaker. The Georgia Constitution mandates a maximum of 56 senators, elected from single-member districts, and a minimum of 180 representatives, apportioned among representative districts (which sometimes results in more than one representative per district); there are currently 56 senators and 180 representatives. The term of office for senators and representatives is two years.[68] The laws enacted by the General Assembly are codified in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.
+State judicial authority rests with the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, which have statewide authority.[69] In addition, there are smaller courts which have more limited geographical jurisdiction, including Superior Courts, State Courts, Juvenile Courts, Magistrate Courts and Probate Courts. Justices of the Supreme Court and judges of the Court of Appeals are elected statewide by the citizens in non-partisan elections to six-year terms. Judges for the smaller courts are elected to four-year terms by the state's citizens who live within that court's jurisdiction.
+Georgia consists of 159 counties, second only to Texas, with 254.[70] Georgia had 161 counties until the end of 1931, when Milton and Campbell were merged into the existing Fulton. Some counties have been named for prominent figures in both American and Georgian history, and many bear names with Native American origin. Counties in Georgia have their own elected legislative branch, usually called the Board of Commissioners, which usually also has executive authority in the county.[71] Several counties have a sole Commissioner form of government, with legislative and executive authority vested in a single person. Georgia is the only state with current Sole Commissioner counties. Georgia's Constitution provides all counties and cities with "home rule" authority. The county commissions have considerable power to pass legislation within their county, as a municipality would.
+Georgia recognizes all local units of government as cities, so every incorporated town is legally a city. Georgia does not provide for townships or independent cities, though there have been bills proposed in the Legislature to provide for townships;[72] it does allow consolidated city-county governments by local referendum. All of Georgia's second-tier cities except Savannah have now formed consolidated city-county governments by referendum: Columbus (in 1970), Athens (1990), Augusta (1995), and Macon (2012). (Augusta and Athens have excluded one or more small, incorporated towns within their consolidated boundaries; Columbus and Macon eventually absorbed all smaller incorporated entities within their consolidated boundaries.) The small town of Cusseta adopted a consolidated city-county government after it merged with unincorporated Chattahoochee County in 2003. Three years later, in 2006, the town of Georgetown consolidated with the rest of Quitman County.
+There is no true metropolitan government in Georgia, though the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and Georgia Regional Transportation Authority do provide some services, and the ARC must approve all major land development projects in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
+Georgia has voted Republican in six consecutive presidential elections since 1996.
+Until 1964, Georgia's state government had the longest unbroken record of single-party dominance, by the Democratic Party, of any state in the Union. This record was established largely due to the disenfranchisement of most blacks and many poor whites by the state in its constitution and laws in the early 20th century. Some elements, such as requiring payment of poll taxes and passing literacy tests, prevented blacks from registering to vote; their exclusion from the political system lasted into the 1960s and reduced the Republican Party to a non-competitive status in the early 20th century.[73]
+White Democrats regained power after Reconstruction due in part to the efforts of some using intimidation and violence, but this method came into disrepute.[74] In 1900, shortly before Georgia adopted a disfranchising constitutional amendment in 1908, blacks comprised 47% of the state's population.[75]
+The whites dealt with this problem of potential political power by the 1908 amendment, which in practice disenfranchised blacks and poor whites, nearly half of the state population. It required that any male at least 21 years of age wanting to register to vote must also: (a) be of good character and able to pass a test on citizenship, (b) be able to read and write provisions of the U.S. and Georgia constitutions, or (c) own at least 40 acres of land or $500 in property. Any Georgian who had fought in any war from the American Revolution through the Spanish–American War was exempted from these additional qualifications. More importantly, any Georgian descended from a veteran of any of these wars also was exempted. Because by 1908 many white Georgia males were grandsons of veterans and/or owned the required property, the exemption and the property requirement basically allowed only well-to-do whites to vote. The qualifications of good character, citizenship knowledge, and literacy (all determined subjectively by white registrars), and property ownership were used to disqualify most blacks and poor whites, preventing them from registering to vote. The voter rolls dropped dramatically.[74][76] In the early 20th century, Progressives promoted electoral reform and reducing the power of ward bosses to clean up politics. Their additional rules, such as the eight-box law, continued to effectively close out people who were illiterate.[17] White, one-party rule was solidified.
+For more than 130 years, from 1872 to 2003, Georgians nominated and elected only white Democratic governors, and white Democrats held the majority of seats in the General Assembly.[77] Most of the Democrats elected throughout these years were Southern Democrats, who were fiscally and socially conservative by national standards.[78][79] This voting pattern continued after the segregationist period.[80]
+Legal segregation was ended by passage of federal legislation in the 1960s. According to the 1960 census, the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American was 28%; hundreds of thousands of blacks had left the state in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. New white residents arrived through migration and immigration. Following support from the national Democratic Party for the civil rights movement and especially civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, most African-American voters, as well as other minority voters, have largely supported the Democratic Party in Georgia.[81] In the decades since the late 20th century, the conservative white-majority voters have increasingly supported Republicans for national and state offices.
+In 2002, incumbent moderate Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was defeated by Republican Sonny Perdue, a state legislator and former Democrat. While Democrats retained control of the State House, they lost their majority in the Senate when four Democrats switched parties. They lost the House in the 2004 election. Republicans then controlled all three partisan elements of the state government.
+Even before 2002, the state had become increasingly supportive of Republicans in Presidential elections. It has supported a Democrat for president only three times since 1960. In 1976 and 1980, native son Jimmy Carter carried the state; in 1992, the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton narrowly won the state. Generally, Republicans are strongest in the predominantly white suburban (especially the Atlanta suburbs) and rural portions of the state.[82] Many of these areas were represented by conservative Democrats in the state legislature well into the 21st century. One of the most conservative of these was U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald, former head of the John Birch Society, who died when the Soviet Union shot down KAL 007 near Sakhalin Island. Democratic candidates have tended to win a higher percentage of the vote in the areas where black voters are most numerous,[82] as well as in the cities among liberal urban populations (especially Atlanta and Athens), and the central and southwestern portion of the state.
+The ascendancy of the Republican Party in Georgia and in the South in general resulted in Georgia U.S. House of Representatives member Newt Gingrich being elected as Speaker of the House following the election of a Republican majority in the House in 1994. Gingrich served as Speaker until 1999, when he resigned in the aftermath of the loss of House seats held by members of the GOP. Gingrich mounted an unsuccessful bid for president in the 2012 election, but withdrew after winning only the South Carolina and Georgia primaries.
+In 2008, Democrat Jim Martin ran against incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss failed to acquire the necessary 50 percent of votes due to a Libertarian Party candidate receiving the remainder of votes. In the runoff election held on December 2, 2008, Chambliss became the second Georgia Republican to be reelected to the U.S. Senate.
+In the 2018 elections, the governor remained a Republican (by 54,723 votes against a democratic black female, Stacey Abrams), Republicans lost eight seats in the Georgia House of Representatives (winning 106), while Democrats gained ten (winning 74), Republicans lost two seats in the Georgia Senate (winning 35 seats), while Democrats gained two seats (winning 21), and five Democrat U.S. Representatives were elected with Republicans winning nine seats (one winning with just 419 votes over the Democratic challenger, and one seat being lost).[83][84][85]
+In the last three presidential elections as of 2018, the Republican candidate has won Georgia by approximately five to eight points over the Democratic nominee, at least once for each election being narrower than margins recorded in some states that have flipped within that timeframe, such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Therefore, it could potentially be regarded as a swing state in future elections should voter preferences only shift slightly.
+During the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia made significant changes in civil rights and governance. As in many other states, its legislature had not reapportioned congressional districts according to population from 1931 to after the 1960 census. Problems of malapportionment in the state legislature, where rural districts had outsize power in relation to urban districts, such as Atlanta's, were corrected after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). The court ruled that congressional districts had to be reapportioned to have essentially equal populations.
+A related case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), required state legislatures to end their use of geographical districts or counties in favor of "one man, one vote"; that is, districts based upon approximately equal populations, to be reviewed and changed as necessary after each census. These changes resulted in residents of Atlanta and other urban areas gaining political power in Georgia in proportion to their populations.[86] From the mid-1960s, the voting electorate increased after African Americans' rights to vote were enforced under civil rights law.
+Economic growth through this period was dominated by Atlanta and its region. It was a bedrock of the emerging "New South". From the late 20th century, Atlanta attracted headquarters and relocated workers of national companies, becoming more diverse, liberal and cosmopolitan than many areas of the state.
+In the 21st century, many conservative Democrats, including former U.S. Senator and governor Zell Miller, decided to support Republicans. The state's socially conservative bent results in wide support for such measures as restrictions on abortion. In 2004, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages was approved by 76% of voters.[87] However, after the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, all Georgia counties came into full compliance, recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state.[88]
+Georgia's 2018 total gross state product was $602 billion.[89] For years Georgia as a state has had the highest credit rating by Standard & Poor's (AAA) and is one of only 15 states with a AAA rating.[90] If Georgia were a stand-alone country, it would be the 28th largest economy in the world, based on data from 2005.[91]
+There are 17 Fortune 500 companies and 26 Fortune 1000 companies with headquarters in Georgia, including Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, TSYS, Delta Air Lines, Aflac, Southern Company, Anthem Inc., and SunTrust Banks.
+Atlanta boasts the world's busiest airport, as measured both by passenger traffic and by aircraft traffic.[93][94] Also, the Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport and fastest-growing container seaport in North America, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95]
+Atlanta has a large effect on the state of Georgia, the Southeastern United States, and beyond. Atlanta has been the site of growth in finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, service, logistics, transportation, film, communications, convention and trade show businesses and industries, while tourism is important to the economy. Atlanta is a global city, also called world city or sometimes alpha city or world center, as a city generally considered to be an important node in the global economic system.
+For the five years through November 2017, Georgia has been ranked the top state (number 1) in the nation to do business, and has been recognized as number 1 for business and labor climate in the nation, number 1 in business climate in the nation, number 1 in the nation in workforce training and as having a "Best in Class" state economic development agency.[96][97]
+In 2016, Georgia had median annual income per person of between $50,000 and $59,999, which is in inflation-adjusted dollars for 2016. The U.S. median annual income for the entire nation is $57,617. This lies within the range of Georgia's median annual income.[98]
+Widespread farms produce peanuts, corn, and soybeans across middle and south Georgia. The state is the number one producer of pecans in the world, with the region around Albany in southwest Georgia being the center of Georgia's pecan production. Gainesville in northeast Georgia touts itself as the Poultry Capital of the World. Georgia is in the top five blueberry producers in the United States.[99]
+Major products in the mineral industry include a variety of clays, stones, sands and the clay palygorskite, known as attapulgite.
+While many textile jobs moved overseas, there is still a textile industry located around the cities of Rome, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and along the I-75 corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Historically it started along the fall line in the Piedmont, where factories were powered by waterfalls and rivers. It includes the towns of Cartersville, Calhoun, Ringgold and Dalton[100]
+In November 2009, Kia started production in Georgia at the first U.S. Kia Motors plant, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia in West Point.
+Industrial products include textiles and apparel, transportation equipment, food processing, paper products, chemicals and products, and electric equipment.
+Georgia was ranked the number 2 state for infrastructure and global access by Area Development magazine.[101]
+The Georgia Ports Authority owns and operates four ports in the state: Port of Savannah, Port of Brunswick, Port Bainbridge, and Port Columbus. The Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport in the United States, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95] The Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal is the largest single container terminal in North America.[102] Several major companies including Target, IKEA, and Heineken operate distribution centers in close proximity to the Port of Savannah.
+Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport moves over 650,000 tons of cargo annually through three cargo complexes (two million square feet of floor space). It has nearby cold storage for perishables; it is the only airport in the Southeast with USDA-approved cold-treatment capabilities. Delta Air Lines also offers an on-airport refrigeration facility for perishable cargo, and a 250-acre Foreign Trade Zone is located at the airport.[103]
+Georgia is a major railway hub, has the most extensive rail system in the Southeast, and has the service of two Class I railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, plus 24 short-line railroads. Georgia is ranked the #3 state in the nation for rail accessibility. Rail shipments include intermodal, bulk, automotive and every other type of shipment.[104]
+Georgia has an extensive interstate highway system including 1,200 miles of interstate highway and 20,000 miles of federal and state highways that facilitate the efficient movement of more than $620 billion of cargo by truck each year. Georgia's six interstates connect to 80 percent of the U.S. population within a two-day truck drive. More than $14 billion in funding has been approved[when?] for new roadway infrastructure.[105]
+Southern Congressmen have attracted major investment by the U.S. military in the state. The several installations include Moody Air Force Base, Fort Stewart, Hunter Army Airfield, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Fort Benning, Robins Air Force Base, Fort Gordon, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Coast Guard Air Station Savannah and Coast Guard Station Brunswick. These installations command numerous jobs and business for related contractors.
+Georgia's electricity generation and consumption are among the highest in the United States, with natural gas being the primary electrical generation fuel, followed by coal. The state also has two nuclear power facilities, Plant Hatch and Plant Vogtle, which contribute almost one fourth of Georgia's electricity generation, and an additional two nuclear power plants are under construction[when?] at Plant Vogtle. In 2013, the generation mix was 39% gas, 35% coal, 23% nuclear, 3% hydro and other renewable sources. The leading area of energy consumption is the industrial sector because Georgia "is a leader in the energy-intensive wood and paper products industry".[106] Solar generated energy is becoming more in use with solar energy generators currently installed ranking Georgia 15th in the country in installed solar capacity. In 2013, $189 million was invested in Georgia to install solar for home, business and utility use representing a 795% increase over the previous year.[107]
+Georgia has a progressive income tax structure with six brackets of state income tax rates that range from 1% to 6%. In 2009, Georgians paid 9% of their income in state and local taxes, compared to the U.S. average of 9.8% of income.[108] This ranks Georgia 25th among the states for total state and local tax burden.[108] The state sales tax in Georgia is 4%[109] with additional percentages added through local options (e.g. special-purpose local-option sales tax or SPLOST), but there is no sales tax on prescription drugs, certain medical devices, or food items for home consumption.[110]
+The state legislature may allow municipalities to institute local sales taxes and special local taxes, such as the 2% SPLOST tax and the 1% sales tax for MARTA serviced counties. Excise taxes are levied on alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel. Owners of real property in Georgia pay property tax to their county. All taxes are collected by the Georgia Department of Revenue and then properly distributed according to any agreements that each county has with its cities.
+The Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office promotes filming in the state.[111] Since 1972, seven hundred film and television projects have been filmed on location in Georgia.[112] Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state location with the most feature films produced. In FY2017, film and television production in Georgia had an economic impact of $9.5 billion.[113] Atlanta now is even called the "Hollywood of the South".[114] Television shows like Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are filmed in the state.[115] Movies too, such as Passengers, Forrest Gump, Contagion, Hidden Figures, Sully, Baby Driver, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Birds of Prey and many more, were filmed around Georgia.[116][117]
+In the Atlanta area, World of Coke, Georgia Aquarium, Zoo Atlanta and Stone Mountain are important tourist attractions.[118][119] Stone Mountain is Georgia's "most popular attraction"; receiving more than four million tourists per year.[120][121] The Georgia Aquarium, in Atlanta, was the largest aquarium in the world in 2010 according to Guinness World Records.[122]
+Callaway Gardens, in western Georgia, is a family resort.[123] The area is also popular with golfers.
+The Savannah Historic District attracts more than eleven million tourists each year.[124]
+The Golden Isles is a string of barrier islands off the Atlantic coast of Georgia near Brunswick that includes beaches, golf courses and the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
+Several sites honor the lives and careers of noted American leaders: the Little White House in Warm Springs, which served as the summer residence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he was being treated for polio; President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains and the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta; the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta, which is the final resting place of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King; and Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King preached.
+Georgia's major fine art museums include the High Museum of Art and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, both in Atlanta; the Georgia Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens; Telfair Museum of Art and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah; and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta.[125]
+The state theatre of Georgia is the Springer Opera House located in Columbus.
+The Atlanta Opera brings opera to Georgia stages.[126] The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the most widely recognized orchestra and largest arts organization in the southeastern United States.[127]
+There are a number of performing arts venues in the state, among the largest are the Fox Theatre, and the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, both on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta as well as the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, located in Northwest Atlanta.
+Authors have grappled with Georgia's complex history. Popular novels related to this include Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
+A number of noted authors, poets and playwrights have lived in Georgia, such as James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, Sidney Lanier, Frank Yerby and Lewis Grizzard.[128]
+Well-known television shows set in Atlanta include, from Tyler Perry Studios, House of Payne and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the CBS sitcom Designing Women, Matlock, the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva, Rectify and numerous HGTV original productions.
+The Dukes of Hazzard, a 1980s TV show, was set in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia. The first five episodes were shot on location in Conyers and Covington, Georgia as well as some locations in Atlanta. Production was then moved to Burbank, California.[citation needed]
+Also filmed in Georgia is The Vampire Diaries, using Covington as the setting for the fictional Mystic Falls.
+A number of notable musicians in various genres of popular music are from Georgia. Among them are Ray Charles (whose many hits include "Georgia on My Mind", now the official state song), and Gladys Knight (known for her Georgia-themed song, "Midnight Train to Georgia").
+Rock groups from Georgia include the Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Black Crowes, and The Allman Brothers.
+The university city of Athens sparked an influential rock music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Among the groups achieving their initial prominence there were R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and the B-52's.
+Since the 1990s, various hip-hop and R&B musicians have included top-selling artists such as Outkast, Usher, Ludacris, TLC, B.o.B., and Ciara. Atlanta is mentioned in a number of these artists' tracks, such as Usher's "A-Town Down" reference in his 2004 hit "Yeah!" (which also features Atlanta artists Lil Jon and Ludacris), Ludacris' "Welcome to Atlanta", Outkast's album "ATLiens", and B.o.B.'s multiple references to Decatur, Georgia, as in his hit song "Strange Clouds".
+Two movies, both set in Atlanta, won Oscars for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Other films set in Georgia include Deliverance (1972), Parental Guidance (2012), and Vacation.
+Sports in Georgia include professional teams in nearly all major sports, Olympic Games contenders and medalists, collegiate teams in major and small-school conferences and associations, and active amateur teams and individual sports. The state of Georgia has teams in four major professional leagues—the Atlanta Braves of Major League Baseball, the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League, the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association, and Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer.
+The Georgia Bulldogs (Southeastern Conference), Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Atlantic Coast Conference), Georgia State Panthers and Georgia Southern Eagles (Sun Belt Conference) are Georgia's NCAA Division I FBS football teams, having won multiple national championships between them. The Georgia Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets have a historical rivalry in college football known as Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, and the Georgia State Panthers and the Georgia Southern Eagles have recently developed their own rivalry.
+The 1996 Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta. The stadium that was built to host various Olympic events was converted to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves through 2016.
+The Masters golf tournament, the first of the PGA tour's four "majors", is held annually the second weekend of April at the Augusta National Golf Club.
+The Atlanta Motor Speedway hosts the Dixie 500 NASCAR Cup Series stock car race and Road Atlanta the Petit Le Mans endurance sports car race.
+Atlanta's Georgia Dome hosted Super Bowl XXVIII in 1994 and Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. The Georgia Dome hosted the NCAA Final Four Men's Basketball National Championship in 2002, 2007, and 2013.[129]
+It hosted WWE's WrestleMania XXVII in 2011, an event which set an attendance record of 71,617. The dome was also the venue of the annual Chick-fil-A Bowl post-season college football games. Since 2017, they have been held at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium along with the FIRST World Championships.
+Professional baseball's Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was from Narrows and was nicknamed the "Georgia Peach".[130]
+There are 48 state parks, 15 historic sites, and numerous wildlife preserves under supervision of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.[131] Other historic sites and parks are supervised by the National Park Service and include the Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville; Appalachian National Scenic Trail; Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area near Atlanta; Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park at Fort Oglethorpe; Cumberland Island National Seashore near St. Marys; Fort Frederica National Monument on St. Simons Island; Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah; Jimmy Carter National Historic Site near Plains; Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park near Kennesaw; Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta; Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon; Trail of Tears National Historic Trail; and the Okefenokee Swamp in Waycross, Georgia[132]
+Outdoor recreational activities include hiking along the Appalachian Trail; Civil War Heritage Trails; rock climbing and whitewater kayaking.[133][134][135][136] Other outdoor activities include hunting and fishing.
+Georgia county and city public school systems are administered by school boards with members elected at the local level. As of 2013[update], all but 19 of 181 boards are elected from single-member districts. Residents and activist groups in Fayette County, Georgia sued the board of commissioners and school board for maintaining an election system based on at-large voting, which tended to increase the power of the majority and effectively prevented minority participation on elected local boards for nearly 200 years.[137] A change to single-member districts has resulted in the African-American minority being able to elect representatives of its choice.
+Georgia high schools (grades nine through twelve) are required to administer a standardized, multiple choice End of Course Test, or EOCT, in each of eight core subjects: algebra, geometry, U.S. history, economics, biology, physical science, ninth grade literature and composition, and American literature. The official purpose of the tests is to assess "specific content knowledge and skills". Although a minimum test score is not required for the student to receive credit in the course, completion of the test is mandatory. The EOCT score accounts for 15% of a student's grade in the course.[138] The Georgia Milestone evaluation is taken by public school students in the state.[139]
+Georgia has 85 public colleges, universities, and technical colleges in addition to more than 45 private institutes of higher learning. Among Georgia's public universities is the flagship research university, the University of Georgia, founded in 1785 as the country's oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education.[140] The University System of Georgia is the presiding body over public post-secondary education in the state. The System includes 29 institutions of higher learning and is governed by the Georgia Board of Regents. Georgia's workforce of more than 6.3 million is constantly refreshed by the growing number of people who move there along with the 90,000 graduates from the universities, colleges and technical colleges across the state, including the highly ranked University of Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University and Emory University.[141]
+The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, is available to all Georgia residents who have graduated from high school or earned a General Educational Development certificate. The student must maintain a 3.2 or higher grade point average and attend a public college or university in the state.
+The Georgia Historical Society, an independent educational and research institution, has a research center located in Savannah. The research center's library and archives hold the oldest collection of materials related to Georgia history in the nation.
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the ninth largest media market in the United States as ranked by Nielsen Media Research. The state's other top markets are Savannah (95th largest), Augusta (115th largest), and Columbus (127th largest).[142]
+There are 48 television broadcast stations in Georgia including TBS, TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, CNN and Headline News, all founded by notable Georgia resident Ted Turner. The Weather Channel also has its headquarters in Atlanta.
+By far, the largest daily newspaper in Georgia is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a daily readership of 195,592 and a Sunday readership of 397,925.[143][144] Other large dailies include The Augusta Chronicle, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, The Telegraph (formerly The Macon Telegraph) and the Savannah Morning News.
+WSB-AM in Atlanta was the first licensed radio station in the southeastern United States, signing on in 1922. Georgia Public Radio has been in service since 1984[145][146] and, with the exception of Atlanta, it broadcasts daily on several FM (and one AM) stations across the state. Georgia Public Radio reaches nearly all of Georgia (with the exception of the Atlanta area, which is served by WABE).
+WSB-TV in Atlanta is the state's oldest television station, having begun operations in 1948. WSB was only the second such operation founded in the Southern U.S., trailing only WTVR in Richmond, Virginia.[citation needed]
+Transportation in Georgia is overseen by the Georgia Department of Transportation, a part of the executive branch of the state government. Georgia's major Interstate Highways are I-20, I-75, I-85, and I-95. On March 18, 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution naming the portion of Interstate Highway 75, which runs from the Chattahoochee River northward to the Tennessee state line the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway. Larry McDonald, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, had been on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983.
+Georgia's primary commercial airport is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), the world's busiest airport.[147] In addition to Hartsfield–Jackson, there are eight other airports serving major commercial traffic in Georgia. Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport is the second-busiest airport in the state as measured by passengers served, and is the only additional international airport. Other commercial airports (ranked in order of passengers served) are located in Augusta, Columbus, Albany, Macon, Brunswick, Valdosta, and Athens.[148]
+The Georgia Ports Authority manages two deepwater seaports, at Savannah and Brunswick, and two river ports, at Bainbridge and Columbus. The Port of Savannah is a major U.S. seaport on the Atlantic coast.
+The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the principal rapid transit system in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Formed in 1971 as strictly a bus system, MARTA operates a network of bus routes linked to a rapid transit system consisting of 48 miles (77 km) of rail track with 38 train stations. MARTA operates almost exclusively in Fulton and DeKalb counties, with bus service to two destinations in Cobb county and the Cumberland Transfer Center next to the Cumberland Mall, and a single rail station in Clayton County at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. MARTA also operates a separate paratransit service for disabled customers. As of 2009[update], the average total daily ridership for the system (bus and rail) was 482,500 passengers.[149]
+The state has 151 general hospitals, more than 15,000 doctors and almost 6,000 dentists.[150] The state is ranked forty-first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise.[151]
+Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Georgia, was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929. He was a civil rights movement leader fighting for rights for African Americans and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.[152] Mordecai Sheftall, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the American Revolution, was born and lived his life in Georgia.[153]
+Reference: Georgia Symbols[154]
+Coordinates: 33°00′N 83°30′W / 33°N 83.5°W / 33; -83.5

en/219.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,227 @@

+Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River, situated in the place that is now the country Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology)[1] with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes (often identified with Narmer).[2] The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age, the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age and the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.
+Egypt reached the pinnacle of its power in the New Kingdom, ruling much of Nubia and a sizable portion of the Near East, after which it entered a period of slow decline. During the course of its history Egypt was invaded or conquered by a number of foreign powers, including the Hyksos, the Libyans, the Nubians, the Assyrians, the Achaemenid Persians, and the Macedonians under the command of Alexander the Great. The Greek Ptolemaic Kingdom, formed in the aftermath of Alexander's death, ruled Egypt until 30 BC, when, under Cleopatra, it fell to the Roman Empire and became a Roman province.[3]
+The success of ancient Egyptian civilization came partly from its ability to adapt to the conditions of the Nile River valley for agriculture. The predictable flooding and controlled irrigation of the fertile valley produced surplus crops, which supported a more dense population, and social development and culture. With resources to spare, the administration sponsored mineral exploitation of the valley and surrounding desert regions, the early development of an independent writing system, the organization of collective construction and agricultural projects, trade with surrounding regions, and a military intended to assert Egyptian dominance. Motivating and organizing these activities was a bureaucracy of elite scribes, religious leaders, and administrators under the control of a pharaoh, who ensured the cooperation and unity of the Egyptian people in the context of an elaborate system of religious beliefs.[4]
+The many achievements of the ancient Egyptians include the quarrying, surveying and construction techniques that supported the building of monumental pyramids, temples, and obelisks; a system of mathematics, a practical and effective system of medicine, irrigation systems and agricultural production techniques, the first known planked boats,[5] Egyptian faience and glass technology, new forms of literature, and the earliest known peace treaty, made with the Hittites.[6] Ancient Egypt has left a lasting legacy. Its art and architecture were widely copied, and its antiquities carried off to far corners of the world. Its monumental ruins have inspired the imaginations of travelers and writers for centuries. A new-found respect for antiquities and excavations in the early modern period by Europeans and Egyptians led to the scientific investigation of Egyptian civilization and a greater appreciation of its cultural legacy.[7]
+The Nile has been the lifeline of its region for much of human history.[8] The fertile floodplain of the Nile gave humans the opportunity to develop a settled agricultural economy and a more sophisticated, centralized society that became a cornerstone in the history of human civilization.[9] Nomadic modern human hunter-gatherers began living in the Nile valley through the end of the Middle Pleistocene some 120,000 years ago. By the late Paleolithic period, the arid climate of Northern Africa became increasingly hot and dry, forcing the populations of the area to concentrate along the river region.
+In Predynastic and Early Dynastic times, the Egyptian climate was much less arid than it is today. Large regions of Egypt were covered in treed savanna and traversed by herds of grazing ungulates. Foliage and fauna were far more prolific in all environs and the Nile region supported large populations of waterfowl. Hunting would have been common for Egyptians, and this is also the period when many animals were first domesticated.[10]
+By about 5500 BC, small tribes living in the Nile valley had developed into a series of cultures demonstrating firm control of agriculture and animal husbandry, and identifiable by their pottery and personal items, such as combs, bracelets, and beads. The largest of these early cultures in upper (Southern) Egypt was the Badarian culture, which probably originated in the Western Desert; it was known for its high quality ceramics, stone tools, and its use of copper.[11]
+The Badari was followed by the Naqada culture: the Amratian (Naqada I), the Gerzeh (Naqada II), and Semainean (Naqada III).[12][page needed] These brought a number of technological improvements. As early as the Naqada I Period, predynastic Egyptians imported obsidian from Ethiopia, used to shape blades and other objects from flakes.[13] In Naqada II times, early evidence exists of contact with the Near East, particularly Canaan and the Byblos coast.[14] Over a period of about 1,000 years, the Naqada culture developed from a few small farming communities into a powerful civilization whose leaders were in complete control of the people and resources of the Nile valley.[15] Establishing a power center at Nekhen (in Greek, Hierakonpolis), and later at Abydos, Naqada III leaders expanded their control of Egypt northwards along the Nile.[16] They also traded with Nubia to the south, the oases of the western desert to the west, and the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East to the east, initiating a period of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations.[17][when?]
+The Naqada culture manufactured a diverse selection of material goods, reflective of the increasing power and wealth of the elite, as well as societal personal-use items, which included combs, small statuary, painted pottery, high quality decorative stone vases, cosmetic palettes, and jewelry made of gold, lapis, and ivory. They also developed a ceramic glaze known as faience, which was used well into the Roman Period to decorate cups, amulets, and figurines.[18] During the last predynastic phase, the Naqada culture began using written symbols that eventually were developed into a full system of hieroglyphs for writing the ancient Egyptian language.[19]
+The Early Dynastic Period was approximately contemporary to the early Sumerian-Akkadian civilisation of Mesopotamia and of ancient Elam. The third-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho grouped the long line of kings from Menes to his own time into 30 dynasties, a system still used today. He began his official history with the king named "Meni" (or Menes in Greek) who was believed to have united the two kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt.[20]
+The transition to a unified state happened more gradually than ancient Egyptian writers represented, and there is no contemporary record of Menes. Some scholars now believe, however, that the mythical Menes may have been the king Narmer, who is depicted wearing royal regalia on the ceremonial Narmer Palette, in a symbolic act of unification.[22] In the Early Dynastic Period, which began about 3000 BC, the first of the Dynastic kings solidified control over lower Egypt by establishing a capital at Memphis, from which he could control the labour force and agriculture of the fertile delta region, as well as the lucrative and critical trade routes to the Levant. The increasing power and wealth of the kings during the early dynastic period was reflected in their elaborate mastaba tombs and mortuary cult structures at Abydos, which were used to celebrate the deified king after his death.[23] The strong institution of kingship developed by the kings served to legitimize state control over the land, labour, and resources that were essential to the survival and growth of ancient Egyptian civilization.[24]
+Major advances in architecture, art, and technology were made during the Old Kingdom, fueled by the increased agricultural productivity and resulting population, made possible by a well-developed central administration.[25] Some of ancient Egypt's crowning achievements, the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx, were constructed during the Old Kingdom. Under the direction of the vizier, state officials collected taxes, coordinated irrigation projects to improve crop yield, drafted peasants to work on construction projects, and established a justice system to maintain peace and order.[26]
+With the rising importance of central administration in Egypt a new class of educated scribes and officials arose who were granted estates by the king in payment for their services. Kings also made land grants to their mortuary cults and local temples, to ensure that these institutions had the resources to worship the king after his death. Scholars believe that five centuries of these practices slowly eroded the economic vitality of Egypt, and that the economy could no longer afford to support a large centralized administration.[27] As the power of the kings diminished, regional governors called nomarchs began to challenge the supremacy of the office of king. This, coupled with severe droughts between 2200 and 2150 BC,[28] is believed to have caused the country to enter the 140-year period of famine and strife known as the First Intermediate Period.[29]
+After Egypt's central government collapsed at the end of the Old Kingdom, the administration could no longer support or stabilize the country's economy. Regional governors could not rely on the king for help in times of crisis, and the ensuing food shortages and political disputes escalated into famines and small-scale civil wars. Yet despite difficult problems, local leaders, owing no tribute to the king, used their new-found independence to establish a thriving culture in the provinces. Once in control of their own resources, the provinces became economically richer—which was demonstrated by larger and better burials among all social classes.[30] In bursts of creativity, provincial artisans adopted and adapted cultural motifs formerly restricted to the royalty of the Old Kingdom, and scribes developed literary styles that expressed the optimism and originality of the period.[31]
+Free from their loyalties to the king, local rulers began competing with each other for territorial control and political power. By 2160 BC, rulers in Herakleopolis controlled Lower Egypt in the north, while a rival clan based in Thebes, the Intef family, took control of Upper Egypt in the south. As the Intefs grew in power and expanded their control northward, a clash between the two rival dynasties became inevitable. Around 2055 BC the northern Theban forces under Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II finally defeated the Herakleopolitan rulers, reuniting the Two Lands. They inaugurated a period of economic and cultural renaissance known as the Middle Kingdom.[32]
+The kings of the Middle Kingdom restored the country's stability and prosperity, thereby stimulating a resurgence of art, literature, and monumental building projects.[33] Mentuhotep II and his Eleventh Dynasty successors ruled from Thebes, but the vizier Amenemhat I, upon assuming the kingship at the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty around 1985 BC, shifted the kingdom's capital to the city of Itjtawy, located in Faiyum.[34] From Itjtawy, the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty undertook a far-sighted land reclamation and irrigation scheme to increase agricultural output in the region. Moreover, the military reconquered territory in Nubia that was rich in quarries and gold mines, while laborers built a defensive structure in the Eastern Delta, called the "Walls-of-the-Ruler", to defend against foreign attack.[35]
+With the kings having secured the country militarily and politically and with vast agricultural and mineral wealth at their disposal, the nation's population, arts, and religion flourished. In contrast to elitist Old Kingdom attitudes towards the gods, the Middle Kingdom displayed an increase in expressions of personal piety.[36] Middle Kingdom literature featured sophisticated themes and characters written in a confident, eloquent style.[31] The relief and portrait sculpture of the period captured subtle, individual details that reached new heights of technical sophistication.[37]
+The last great ruler of the Middle Kingdom, Amenemhat III, allowed Semitic-speaking Canaanite settlers from the Near East into the Delta region to provide a sufficient labour force for his especially active mining and building campaigns. These ambitious building and mining activities, however, combined with severe Nile floods later in his reign, strained the economy and precipitated the slow decline into the Second Intermediate Period during the later Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties. During this decline, the Canaanite settlers began to assume greater control of the Delta region, eventually coming to power in Egypt as the Hyksos.[38]
+Around 1785 BC, as the power of the Middle Kingdom kings weakened, a Western Asian people called the Hyksos, who had already settled in the Delta, seized control of Egypt and established their capital at Avaris, forcing the former central government to retreat to Thebes. The king was treated as a vassal and expected to pay tribute.[39] The Hyksos ("foreign rulers") retained Egyptian models of government and identified as kings, thereby integrating Egyptian elements into their culture. They and other invaders introduced new tools of warfare into Egypt, most notably the composite bow and the horse-drawn chariot.[40]
+After retreating south, the native Theban kings found themselves trapped between the Canaanite Hyksos ruling the north and the Hyksos' Nubian allies, the Kushites, to the south. After years of vassalage, Thebes gathered enough strength to challenge the Hyksos in a conflict that lasted more than 30 years, until 1555 BC.[39] The kings Seqenenre Tao II and Kamose were ultimately able to defeat the Nubians to the south of Egypt, but failed to defeat the Hyksos. That task fell to Kamose's successor, Ahmose I, who successfully waged a series of campaigns that permanently eradicated the Hyksos' presence in Egypt. He established a new dynasty and, in the New Kingdom that followed, the military became a central priority for the kings, who sought to expand Egypt's borders and attempted to gain mastery of the Near East.[41]
+The New Kingdom pharaohs established a period of unprecedented prosperity by securing their borders and strengthening diplomatic ties with their neighbours, including the Mitanni Empire, Assyria, and Canaan. Military campaigns waged under Tuthmosis I and his grandson Tuthmosis III extended the influence of the pharaohs to the largest empire Egypt had ever seen. Beginning with Merneptah the rulers of Egypt adopted the title of pharaoh.
+Between their reigns, Hatshepsut, a queen who established herself as pharaoh, launched many building projects, including restoration of temples damaged by the Hyksos, and sent trading expeditions to Punt and the Sinai.[42] When Tuthmosis III died in 1425 BC, Egypt had an empire extending from Niya in north west Syria to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile in Nubia, cementing loyalties and opening access to critical imports such as bronze and wood.[43]
+The New Kingdom pharaohs began a large-scale building campaign to promote the god Amun, whose growing cult was based in Karnak. They also constructed monuments to glorify their own achievements, both real and imagined. The Karnak temple is the largest Egyptian temple ever built.[44]
+Around 1350 BC, the stability of the New Kingdom was threatened when Amenhotep IV ascended the throne and instituted a series of radical and chaotic reforms. Changing his name to Akhenaten, he touted the previously obscure sun deity Aten as the supreme deity, suppressed the worship of most other deities, and moved the capital to the new city of Akhetaten (modern-day Amarna).[45] He was devoted to his new religion and artistic style. After his death, the cult of the Aten was quickly abandoned and the traditional religious order restored. The subsequent pharaohs, Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemheb, worked to erase all mention of Akhenaten's heresy, now known as the Amarna Period.[46]
+Around 1279 BC, Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great, ascended the throne, and went on to build more temples, erect more statues and obelisks, and sire more children than any other pharaoh in history.[a] A bold military leader, Ramesses II led his army against the Hittites in the Battle of Kadesh (in modern Syria) and, after fighting to a stalemate, finally agreed to the first recorded peace treaty, around 1258 BC.[47]
+Egypt's wealth, however, made it a tempting target for invasion, particularly by the Libyan Berbers to the west, and the Sea Peoples, a conjectured confederation of seafarers from the Aegean Sea.[b]  Initially, the military was able to repel these invasions, but Egypt eventually lost control of its remaining territories in southern Canaan, much of it falling to the Assyrians. The effects of external threats were exacerbated by internal problems such as corruption, tomb robbery, and civil unrest. After regaining their power, the high priests at the temple of Amun in Thebes accumulated vast tracts of land and wealth, and their expanded power splintered the country during the Third Intermediate Period.[48]
+Following the death of Ramesses XI in 1078 BC, Smendes assumed authority over the northern part of Egypt, ruling from the city of Tanis. The south was effectively controlled by the High Priests of Amun at Thebes, who recognized Smendes in name only.[49] During this time, Libyans had been settling in the western delta, and chieftains of these settlers began increasing their autonomy. Libyan princes took control of the delta under Shoshenq I in 945 BC, founding the so-called Libyan or Bubastite dynasty that would rule for some 200 years. Shoshenq also gained control of southern Egypt by placing his family members in important priestly positions. Libyan control began to erode as a rival dynasty in the delta arose in Leontopolis, and Kushites threatened from the south. Around 727 BC the Kushite king Piye invaded northward, seizing control of Thebes and eventually the Delta.[50]
+Egypt's far-reaching prestige declined considerably toward the end of the Third Intermediate Period. Its foreign allies had fallen under the Assyrian sphere of influence, and by 700 BC war between the two states became inevitable. Between 671 and 667 BC the Assyrians began the Assyrian conquest of Egypt. The reigns of both Taharqa and his successor, Tanutamun, were filled with constant conflict with the Assyrians, against whom Egypt enjoyed several victories. Ultimately, the Assyrians pushed the Kushites back into Nubia, occupied Memphis, and sacked the temples of Thebes.[52]
+The Assyrians left control of Egypt to a series of vassals who became known as the Saite kings of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty. By 653 BC, the Saite king Psamtik I was able to oust the Assyrians with the help of Greek mercenaries, who were recruited to form Egypt's first navy. Greek influence expanded greatly as the city-state of Naukratis became the home of Greeks in the Nile Delta. The Saite kings based in the new capital of Sais witnessed a brief but spirited resurgence in the economy and culture, but in 525 BC, the powerful Persians, led by Cambyses II, began their conquest of Egypt, eventually capturing the pharaoh Psamtik III at the battle of Pelusium. Cambyses II then assumed the formal title of pharaoh, but ruled Egypt from Iran, leaving Egypt under the control of a satrapy. A few successful revolts against the Persians marked the 5th century BC, but Egypt was never able to permanently overthrow the Persians.[53]
+Following its annexation by Persia, Egypt was joined with Cyprus and Phoenicia in the sixth satrapy of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. This first period of Persian rule over Egypt, also known as the Twenty-Seventh dynasty, ended in 402 BC, when Egypt regained independence under a series of native dynasties. The last of these dynasties, the Thirtieth, proved to be the last native royal house of ancient Egypt, ending with the kingship of Nectanebo II. A brief restoration of Persian rule, sometimes known as the Thirty-First Dynasty, began in 343 BC, but shortly after, in 332 BC, the Persian ruler Mazaces handed Egypt over to Alexander the Great without a fight.[54]
+In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt with little resistance from the Persians and was welcomed by the Egyptians as a deliverer. The administration established by Alexander's successors, the Macedonian Ptolemaic Kingdom, was based on an Egyptian model and based in the new capital city of Alexandria. The city showcased the power and prestige of Hellenistic rule, and became a seat of learning and culture, centered at the famous Library of Alexandria.[55] The Lighthouse of Alexandria lit the way for the many ships that kept trade flowing through the city—as the Ptolemies made commerce and revenue-generating enterprises, such as papyrus manufacturing, their top priority.[56]
+Hellenistic culture did not supplant native Egyptian culture, as the Ptolemies supported time-honored traditions in an effort to secure the loyalty of the populace. They built new temples in Egyptian style, supported traditional cults, and portrayed themselves as pharaohs. Some traditions merged, as Greek and Egyptian gods were syncretized into composite deities, such as Serapis, and classical Greek forms of sculpture influenced traditional Egyptian motifs. Despite their efforts to appease the Egyptians, the Ptolemies were challenged by native rebellion, bitter family rivalries, and the powerful mob of Alexandria that formed after the death of Ptolemy IV.[57] In addition, as Rome relied more heavily on imports of grain from Egypt, the Romans took great interest in the political situation in the country. Continued Egyptian revolts, ambitious politicians, and powerful opponents from the Near East made this situation unstable, leading Rome to send forces to secure the country as a province of its empire.[58]
+Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire in 30 BC, following the defeat of Marc Antony and Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII by Octavian (later Emperor Augustus) in the Battle of Actium. The Romans relied heavily on grain shipments from Egypt, and the Roman army, under the control of a prefect appointed by the Emperor, quelled rebellions, strictly enforced the collection of heavy taxes, and prevented attacks by bandits, which had become a notorious problem during the period.[59] Alexandria became an increasingly important center on the trade route with the orient, as exotic luxuries were in high demand in Rome.[60]
+Although the Romans had a more hostile attitude than the Greeks towards the Egyptians, some traditions such as mummification and worship of the traditional gods continued.[61] The art of mummy portraiture flourished, and some Roman emperors had themselves depicted as pharaohs, though not to the extent that the Ptolemies had. The former lived outside Egypt and did not perform the ceremonial functions of Egyptian kingship. Local administration became Roman in style and closed to native Egyptians.[61]
+From the mid-first century AD, Christianity took root in Egypt and it was originally seen as another cult that could be accepted. However, it was an uncompromising religion that sought to win converts from Egyptian Religion and Greco-Roman religion and threatened popular religious traditions. This led to the persecution of converts to Christianity, culminating in the great purges of Diocletian starting in 303, but eventually Christianity won out.[62] In 391 the Christian Emperor Theodosius introduced legislation that banned pagan rites and closed temples.[63] Alexandria became the scene of great anti-pagan riots with public and private religious imagery destroyed.[64] As a consequence, Egypt's native religious culture was continually in decline. While the native population continued to speak their language, the ability to read hieroglyphic writing slowly disappeared as the role of the Egyptian temple priests and priestesses diminished. The temples themselves were sometimes converted to churches or abandoned to the desert.[65]
+In the fourth century, as the Roman Empire divided, Egypt found itself in the Eastern Empire with its capital at Constantinople. In the waning years of the Empire, Egypt fell to the Sasanian Persian army (618–628 AD), was recaptured by the Roman Emperor Heraclius (629–639 AD), and then was finally captured by Muslim Rashidun army in 639–641 AD, ending Roman rule.
+The pharaoh was the absolute monarch of the country and, at least in theory, wielded complete control of the land and its resources. The king was the supreme military commander and head of the government, who relied on a bureaucracy of officials to manage his affairs. In charge of the administration was his second in command, the vizier, who acted as the king's representative and coordinated land surveys, the treasury, building projects, the legal system, and the archives.[66] At a regional level, the country was divided into as many as 42 administrative regions called nomes each governed by a nomarch, who was accountable to the vizier for his jurisdiction. The temples formed the backbone of the economy. Not only were they houses of worship, but were also responsible for collecting and storing the kingdom's wealth in a system of granaries and treasuries administered by overseers, who redistributed grain and goods.[67]
+Much of the economy was centrally organized and strictly controlled. Although the ancient Egyptians did not use coinage until the Late period,[68] they did use a type of money-barter system,[69] with standard sacks of grain and the deben, a weight of roughly 91 grams (3 oz) of copper or silver, forming a common denominator.[70] Workers were paid in grain; a simple laborer might earn 51⁄2 sacks (200 kg or 400 lb) of grain per month, while a foreman might earn 71⁄2 sacks (250 kg or 550 lb). Prices were fixed across the country and recorded in lists to facilitate trading; for example a shirt cost five copper deben, while a cow cost 140 deben.[70] Grain could be traded for other goods, according to the fixed price list.[70] During the fifth century BC coined money was introduced into Egypt from abroad. At first the coins were used as standardized pieces of precious metal rather than true money, but in the following centuries international traders came to rely on coinage.[71]
+Egyptian society was highly stratified, and social status was expressly displayed. Farmers made up the bulk of the population, but agricultural produce was owned directly by the state, temple, or noble family that owned the land.[72] Farmers were also subject to a labor tax and were required to work on irrigation or construction projects in a corvée system.[73] Artists and craftsmen were of higher status than farmers, but they were also under state control, working in the shops attached to the temples and paid directly from the state treasury. Scribes and officials formed the upper class in ancient Egypt, known as the "white kilt class" in reference to the bleached linen garments that served as a mark of their rank.[74] The upper class prominently displayed their social status in art and literature. Below the nobility were the priests, physicians, and engineers with specialized training in their field. It is unclear whether slavery as understood today existed in ancient Egypt, there is difference of opinions among authors.[75]
+The ancient Egyptians viewed men and women, including people from all social classes, as essentially equal under the law, and even the lowliest peasant was entitled to petition the vizier and his court for redress.[76] Although slaves were mostly used as indentured servants, they were able to buy and sell their servitude, work their way to freedom or nobility, and were usually treated by doctors in the workplace.[77] Both men and women had the right to own and sell property, make contracts, marry and divorce, receive inheritance, and pursue legal disputes in court. Married couples could own property jointly and protect themselves from divorce by agreeing to marriage contracts, which stipulated the financial obligations of the husband to his wife and children should the marriage end. Compared with their counterparts in ancient Greece, Rome, and even more modern places around the world, ancient Egyptian women had a greater range of personal choices, legal rights, and opportunities for achievement. Women such as Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII even became pharaohs, while others wielded power as Divine Wives of Amun. Despite these freedoms, ancient Egyptian women did not often take part in official roles in the administration, aside from the royal high priestesses, apparently served only secondary roles in the temples (not much data for many dynasties), and were not so likely to be as educated as men.[76]
+The head of the legal system was officially the pharaoh, who was responsible for enacting laws, delivering justice, and maintaining law and order, a concept the ancient Egyptians referred to as Ma'at.[66] Although no legal codes from ancient Egypt survive, court documents show that Egyptian law was based on a common-sense view of right and wrong that emphasized reaching agreements and resolving conflicts rather than strictly adhering to a complicated set of statutes.[76] Local councils of elders, known as Kenbet in the New Kingdom, were responsible for ruling in court cases involving small claims and minor disputes.[66] More serious cases involving murder, major land transactions, and tomb robbery were referred to the Great Kenbet, over which the vizier or pharaoh presided. Plaintiffs and defendants were expected to represent themselves and were required to swear an oath that they had told the truth. In some cases, the state took on both the role of prosecutor and judge, and it could torture the accused with beatings to obtain a confession and the names of any co-conspirators. Whether the charges were trivial or serious, court scribes documented the complaint, testimony, and verdict of the case for future reference.[78]
+Punishment for minor crimes involved either imposition of fines, beatings, facial mutilation, or exile, depending on the severity of the offense. Serious crimes such as murder and tomb robbery were punished by execution, carried out by decapitation, drowning, or impaling the criminal on a stake. Punishment could also be extended to the criminal's family.[66] Beginning in the New Kingdom, oracles played a major role in the legal system, dispensing justice in both civil and criminal cases. The procedure was to ask the god a "yes" or "no" question concerning the right or wrong of an issue. The god, carried by a number of priests, rendered judgment by choosing one or the other, moving forward or backward, or pointing to one of the answers written on a piece of papyrus or an ostracon.[79]
+A combination of favorable geographical features contributed to the success of ancient Egyptian culture, the most important of which was the rich fertile soil resulting from annual inundations of the Nile River. The ancient Egyptians were thus able to produce an abundance of food, allowing the population to devote more time and resources to cultural, technological, and artistic pursuits. Land management was crucial in ancient Egypt because taxes were assessed based on the amount of land a person owned.[80]
+Farming in Egypt was dependent on the cycle of the Nile River. The Egyptians recognized three seasons: Akhet (flooding), Peret (planting), and Shemu (harvesting). The flooding season lasted from June to September, depositing on the river's banks a layer of mineral-rich silt ideal for growing crops. After the floodwaters had receded, the growing season lasted from October to February. Farmers plowed and planted seeds in the fields, which were irrigated with ditches and canals. Egypt received little rainfall, so farmers relied on the Nile to water their crops.[81] From March to May, farmers used sickles to harvest their crops, which were then threshed with a flail to separate the straw from the grain. Winnowing removed the chaff from the grain, and the grain was then ground into flour, brewed to make beer, or stored for later use.[82]
+The ancient Egyptians cultivated emmer and barley, and several other cereal grains, all of which were used to make the two main food staples of bread and beer.[83] Flax plants, uprooted before they started flowering, were grown for the fibers of their stems. These fibers were split along their length and spun into thread, which was used to weave sheets of linen and to make clothing. Papyrus growing on the banks of the Nile River was used to make paper. Vegetables and fruits were grown in garden plots, close to habitations and on higher ground, and had to be watered by hand. Vegetables included leeks, garlic, melons, squashes, pulses, lettuce, and other crops, in addition to grapes that were made into wine.[84]
+The Egyptians believed that a balanced relationship between people and animals was an essential element of the cosmic order; thus humans, animals and plants were believed to be members of a single whole.[85] Animals, both domesticated and wild, were therefore a critical source of spirituality, companionship, and sustenance to the ancient Egyptians. Cattle were the most important livestock; the administration collected taxes on livestock in regular censuses, and the size of a herd reflected the prestige and importance of the estate or temple that owned them. In addition to cattle, the ancient Egyptians kept sheep, goats, and pigs. Poultry, such as ducks, geese, and pigeons, were captured in nets and bred on farms, where they were force-fed with dough to fatten them.[86] The Nile provided a plentiful source of fish. Bees were also domesticated from at least the Old Kingdom, and provided both honey and wax.[87]
+The ancient Egyptians used donkeys and oxen as beasts of burden, and they were responsible for plowing the fields and trampling seed into the soil. The slaughter of a fattened ox was also a central part of an offering ritual.[86] Horses were introduced by the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period. Camels, although known from the New Kingdom, were not used as beasts of burden until the Late Period. There is also evidence to suggest that elephants were briefly utilized in the Late Period but largely abandoned due to lack of grazing land.[86] Dogs, cats, and monkeys were common family pets, while more exotic pets imported from the heart of Africa, such as Sub-Saharan African lions,[88] were reserved for royalty. Herodotus observed that the Egyptians were the only people to keep their animals with them in their houses.[85] During the Late Period, the worship of the gods in their animal form was extremely popular, such as the cat goddess Bastet and the ibis god Thoth, and these animals were kept in large numbers for the purpose of ritual sacrifice.[89]
+Egypt is rich in building and decorative stone, copper and lead ores, gold, and semiprecious stones. These natural resources allowed the ancient Egyptians to build monuments, sculpt statues, make tools, and fashion jewelry.[90] Embalmers used salts from the Wadi Natrun for mummification, which also provided the gypsum needed to make plaster.[91] Ore-bearing rock formations were found in distant, inhospitable wadis in the Eastern Desert and the Sinai, requiring large, state-controlled expeditions to obtain natural resources found there. There were extensive gold mines in Nubia, and one of the first maps known is of a gold mine in this region. The Wadi Hammamat was a notable source of granite, greywacke, and gold. Flint was the first mineral collected and used to make tools, and flint handaxes are the earliest pieces of evidence of habitation in the Nile valley. Nodules of the mineral were carefully flaked to make blades and arrowheads of moderate hardness and durability even after copper was adopted for this purpose.[92] Ancient Egyptians were among the first to use minerals such as sulfur as cosmetic substances.[93]
+The Egyptians worked deposits of the lead ore galena at Gebel Rosas to make net sinkers, plumb bobs, and small figurines. Copper was the most important metal for toolmaking in ancient Egypt and was smelted in furnaces from malachite ore mined in the Sinai.[94] Workers collected gold by washing the nuggets out of sediment in alluvial deposits, or by the more labor-intensive process of grinding and washing gold-bearing quartzite. Iron deposits found in upper Egypt were utilized in the Late Period.[95] High-quality building stones were abundant in Egypt; the ancient Egyptians quarried limestone all along the Nile valley, granite from Aswan, and basalt and sandstone from the wadis of the Eastern Desert. Deposits of decorative stones such as porphyry, greywacke, alabaster, and carnelian dotted the Eastern Desert and were collected even before the First Dynasty. In the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, miners worked deposits of emeralds in Wadi Sikait and amethyst in Wadi el-Hudi.[96]
+The ancient Egyptians engaged in trade with their foreign neighbors to obtain rare, exotic goods not found in Egypt. In the Predynastic Period, they established trade with Nubia to obtain gold and incense. They also established trade with Palestine, as evidenced by Palestinian-style oil jugs found in the burials of the First Dynasty pharaohs.[97] An Egyptian colony stationed in southern Canaan dates to slightly before the First Dynasty.[98] Narmer had Egyptian pottery produced in Canaan and exported back to Egypt.[99][100]
+By the Second Dynasty at latest, ancient Egyptian trade with Byblos yielded a critical source of quality timber not found in Egypt. By the Fifth Dynasty, trade with Punt provided gold, aromatic resins, ebony, ivory, and wild animals such as monkeys and baboons.[101] Egypt relied on trade with Anatolia for essential quantities of tin as well as supplementary supplies of copper, both metals being necessary for the manufacture of bronze. The ancient Egyptians prized the blue stone lapis lazuli, which had to be imported from far-away Afghanistan. Egypt's Mediterranean trade partners also included Greece and Crete, which provided, among other goods, supplies of olive oil.[102] In exchange for its luxury imports and raw materials, Egypt mainly exported grain, gold, linen, and papyrus, in addition to other finished goods including glass and stone objects.[103][better source needed]
+The Egyptian language is a northern Afro-Asiatic language closely related to the Berber and Semitic languages.[104] It has the second longest known history of any language (after Sumerian), having been written from c. 3200 BC to the Middle Ages and remaining as a spoken language for longer. The phases of ancient Egyptian are Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian (Classical Egyptian), Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic.[105] Egyptian writings do not show dialect differences before Coptic, but it was probably spoken in regional dialects around Memphis and later Thebes.[106]
+Ancient Egyptian was a synthetic language, but it became more analytic later on. Late Egyptian developed prefixal definite and indefinite articles, which replaced the older inflectional suffixes. There was a change from the older verb–subject–object word order to subject–verb–object.[107] The Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts were eventually replaced by the more phonetic Coptic alphabet. Coptic is still used in the liturgy of the Egyptian Orthodox Church, and traces of it are found in modern Egyptian Arabic.[108]
+Ancient Egyptian has 25 consonants similar to those of other Afro-Asiatic languages. These include pharyngeal and emphatic consonants, voiced and voiceless stops, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless affricates. It has three long and three short vowels, which expanded in Late Egyptian to about nine.[109] The basic word in Egyptian, similar to Semitic and Berber, is a triliteral or biliteral root of consonants and semiconsonants. Suffixes are added to form words. The verb conjugation corresponds to the person. For example, the triconsonantal skeleton S-Ḏ-M is the semantic core of the word 'hear'; its basic conjugation is sḏm, 'he hears'. If the subject is a noun, suffixes are not added to the verb:[110] sḏm ḥmt, 'the woman hears'.
+Adjectives are derived from nouns through a process that Egyptologists call nisbation because of its similarity with Arabic.[111] The word order is predicate–subject in verbal and adjectival sentences, and subject–predicate in nominal and adverbial sentences.[112] The subject can be moved to the beginning of sentences if it is long and is followed by a resumptive pronoun.[113] Verbs and nouns are negated by the particle n, but nn is used for adverbial and adjectival sentences. Stress falls on the ultimate or penultimate syllable, which can be open (CV) or closed (CVC).[114]
+Hieroglyphic writing dates from c. 3000 BC, and is composed of hundreds of symbols. A hieroglyph can represent a word, a sound, or a silent determinative; and the same symbol can serve different purposes in different contexts. Hieroglyphs were a formal script, used on stone monuments and in tombs, that could be as detailed as individual works of art. In day-to-day writing, scribes used a cursive form of writing, called hieratic, which was quicker and easier. While formal hieroglyphs may be read in rows or columns in either direction (though typically written from right to left), hieratic was always written from right to left, usually in horizontal rows. A new form of writing, Demotic, became the prevalent writing style, and it is this form of writing—along with formal hieroglyphs—that accompany the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone.[116]
+Around the first century AD, the Coptic alphabet started to be used alongside the Demotic script. Coptic is a modified Greek alphabet with the addition of some Demotic signs.[117] Although formal hieroglyphs were used in a ceremonial role until the fourth century, towards the end only a small handful of priests could still read them. As the traditional religious establishments were disbanded, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was mostly lost. Attempts to decipher them date to the Byzantine[118] and Islamic periods in Egypt,[119] but only in the 1820s, after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and years of research by Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, were hieroglyphs substantially deciphered.[120]
+Writing first appeared in association with kingship on labels and tags for items found in royal tombs. It was primarily an occupation of the scribes, who worked out of the Per Ankh institution or the House of Life. The latter comprised offices, libraries (called House of Books), laboratories and observatories.[121] Some of the best-known pieces of ancient Egyptian literature, such as the Pyramid and Coffin Texts, were written in Classical Egyptian, which continued to be the language of writing until about 1300 BC. Late Egyptian was spoken from the New Kingdom onward and is represented in Ramesside administrative documents, love poetry and tales, as well as in Demotic and Coptic texts. During this period, the tradition of writing had evolved into the tomb autobiography, such as those of Harkhuf and Weni. The genre known as Sebayt ("instructions") was developed to communicate teachings and guidance from famous nobles; the Ipuwer papyrus, a poem of lamentations describing natural disasters and social upheaval, is a famous example.
+The Story of Sinuhe, written in Middle Egyptian, might be the classic of Egyptian literature.[122] Also written at this time was the Westcar Papyrus, a set of stories told to Khufu by his sons relating the marvels performed by priests.[123] The Instruction of Amenemope is considered a masterpiece of Near Eastern literature.[124] Towards the end of the New Kingdom, the vernacular language was more often employed to write popular pieces like the Story of Wenamun and the Instruction of Any. The former tells the story of a noble who is robbed on his way to buy cedar from Lebanon and of his struggle to return to Egypt. From about 700 BC, narrative stories and instructions, such as the popular Instructions of Onchsheshonqy, as well as personal and business documents were written in the demotic script and phase of Egyptian. Many stories written in demotic during the Greco-Roman period were set in previous historical eras, when Egypt was an independent nation ruled by great pharaohs such as Ramesses II.[125]
+Most ancient Egyptians were farmers tied to the land. Their dwellings were restricted to immediate family members, and were constructed of mud-brick designed to remain cool in the heat of the day. Each home had a kitchen with an open roof, which contained a grindstone for milling grain and a small oven for baking the bread.[126] Walls were painted white and could be covered with dyed linen wall hangings. Floors were covered with reed mats, while wooden stools, beds raised from the floor and individual tables comprised the furniture.[127]
+The ancient Egyptians placed a great value on hygiene and appearance. Most bathed in the Nile and used a pasty soap made from animal fat and chalk. Men shaved their entire bodies for cleanliness; perfumes and aromatic ointments covered bad odors and soothed skin.[128] Clothing was made from simple linen sheets that were bleached white, and both men and women of the upper classes wore wigs, jewelry, and cosmetics. Children went without clothing until maturity, at about age 12, and at this age males were circumcised and had their heads shaved. Mothers were responsible for taking care of the children, while the father provided the family's income.[129]
+Music and dance were popular entertainments for those who could afford them. Early instruments included flutes and harps, while instruments similar to trumpets, oboes, and pipes developed later and became popular. In the New Kingdom, the Egyptians played on bells, cymbals, tambourines, drums, and imported lutes and lyres from Asia.[130] The sistrum was a rattle-like musical instrument that was especially important in religious ceremonies.
+The ancient Egyptians enjoyed a variety of leisure activities, including games and music. Senet, a board game where pieces moved according to random chance, was particularly popular from the earliest times; another similar game was mehen, which had a circular gaming board. “Hounds and Jackals” also known as 58 holes is another example of board games played in ancient Egypt. The first complete set of this game was discovered from a Theban tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhat IV that dates to the 13th Dynasty.[131] Juggling and ball games were popular with children, and wrestling is also documented in a tomb at Beni Hasan.[132] The wealthy members of ancient Egyptian society enjoyed hunting and boating as well.
+The excavation of the workers' village of Deir el-Medina has resulted in one of the most thoroughly documented accounts of community life in the ancient world, which spans almost four hundred years. There is no comparable site in which the organization, social interactions, and working and living conditions of a community have been studied in such detail.[133]
+Egyptian cuisine remained remarkably stable over time; indeed, the cuisine of modern Egypt retains some striking similarities to the cuisine of the ancients. The staple diet consisted of bread and beer, supplemented with vegetables such as onions and garlic, and fruit such as dates and figs. Wine and meat were enjoyed by all on feast days while the upper classes indulged on a more regular basis. Fish, meat, and fowl could be salted or dried, and could be cooked in stews or roasted on a grill.[134]
+The architecture of ancient Egypt includes some of the most famous structures in the world: the Great Pyramids of Giza and the temples at Thebes. Building projects were organized and funded by the state for religious and commemorative purposes, but also to reinforce the wide-ranging power of the pharaoh. The ancient Egyptians were skilled builders; using only simple but effective tools and sighting instruments, architects could build large stone structures with great accuracy and precision that is still envied today.[135]
+The domestic dwellings of elite and ordinary Egyptians alike were constructed from perishable materials such as mud bricks and wood, and have not survived. Peasants lived in simple homes, while the palaces of the elite and the pharaoh were more elaborate structures. A few surviving New Kingdom palaces, such as those in Malkata and Amarna, show richly decorated walls and floors with scenes of people, birds, water pools, deities and geometric designs.[136] Important structures such as temples and tombs that were intended to last forever were constructed of stone instead of mud bricks. The architectural elements used in the world's first large-scale stone building, Djoser's mortuary complex, include post and lintel supports in the papyrus and lotus motif.
+The earliest preserved ancient Egyptian temples, such as those at Giza, consist of single, enclosed halls with roof slabs supported by columns. In the New Kingdom, architects added the pylon, the open courtyard, and the enclosed hypostyle hall to the front of the temple's sanctuary, a style that was standard until the Greco-Roman period.[137] The earliest and most popular tomb architecture in the Old Kingdom was the mastaba, a flat-roofed rectangular structure of mudbrick or stone built over an underground burial chamber. The step pyramid of Djoser is a series of stone mastabas stacked on top of each other. Pyramids were built during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but most later rulers abandoned them in favor of less conspicuous rock-cut tombs.[138] The use of the pyramid form continued in private tomb chapels of the New Kingdom and in the royal pyramids of Nubia.[139]
+Model of a household porch and garden, c. 1981–1975 BC]]
+The Temple of Dendur, completed by 10 BC, made of aeolian sandstone, temple proper: height: 6.4 m, width: 6.4 m; length: 12.5 m, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
+The well preserved Temple of Isis from Philae (Egypt) is an example of Egyptian architecture and architectural sculpture
+Illustration of various types of capitals, drawn by the egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius
+The ancient Egyptians produced art to serve functional purposes. For over 3500 years, artists adhered to artistic forms and iconography that were developed during the Old Kingdom, following a strict set of principles that resisted foreign influence and internal change.[140] These artistic standards—simple lines, shapes, and flat areas of color combined with the characteristic flat projection of figures with no indication of spatial depth—created a sense of order and balance within a composition. Images and text were intimately interwoven on tomb and temple walls, coffins, stelae, and even statues. The Narmer Palette, for example, displays figures that can also be read as hieroglyphs.[141] Because of the rigid rules that governed its highly stylized and symbolic appearance, ancient Egyptian art served its political and religious purposes with precision and clarity.[142]
+Ancient Egyptian artisans used stone as a medium for carving statues and fine reliefs, but used wood as a cheap and easily carved substitute. Paints were obtained from minerals such as iron ores (red and yellow ochres), copper ores (blue and green), soot or charcoal (black), and limestone (white). Paints could be mixed with gum arabic as a binder and pressed into cakes, which could be moistened with water when needed.[143]
+Pharaohs used reliefs to record victories in battle, royal decrees, and religious scenes. Common citizens had access to pieces of funerary art, such as shabti statues and books of the dead, which they believed would protect them in the afterlife.[144] During the Middle Kingdom, wooden or clay models depicting scenes from everyday life became popular additions to the tomb. In an attempt to duplicate the activities of the living in the afterlife, these models show laborers, houses, boats, and even military formations that are scale representations of the ideal ancient Egyptian afterlife.[145]
+Despite the homogeneity of ancient Egyptian art, the styles of particular times and places sometimes reflected changing cultural or political attitudes. After the invasion of the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period, Minoan-style frescoes were found in Avaris.[146] The most striking example of a politically driven change in artistic forms comes from the Amarna period, where figures were radically altered to conform to Akhenaten's revolutionary religious ideas.[147] This style, known as Amarna art, was quickly abandoned after Akhenaten's death and replaced by the traditional forms.[148]
+Kneeling portrait statue of Amenemhat holding a stele with an inscription; circa 1500 BC; limestone; Egyptian Museum of Berlin (Germany)
+Fresco which depicts Nebamun hunting birds; 1350 BC; paint on plaster; 98 × 83 cm; British Museum (London)
+Portrait head of pharaoh Hatshepsut or Thutmose III; 1480-1425 BC; most probably granite; height: 16.5 cm; Egyptian Museum of Berlin
+Falcon box with wrapped contents; 332–30 BC; painted and gilded wood, linen, resin and feathers; 58.5 × 24.9 cm; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
+Beliefs in the divine and in the afterlife were ingrained in ancient Egyptian civilization from its inception; pharaonic rule was based on the divine right of kings. The Egyptian pantheon was populated by gods who had supernatural powers and were called on for help or protection. However, the gods were not always viewed as benevolent, and Egyptians believed they had to be appeased with offerings and prayers. The structure of this pantheon changed continually as new deities were promoted in the hierarchy, but priests made no effort to organize the diverse and sometimes conflicting myths and stories into a coherent system.[149] These various conceptions of divinity were not considered contradictory but rather layers in the multiple facets of reality.[150]
+Gods were worshiped in cult temples administered by priests acting on the king's behalf. At the center of the temple was the cult statue in a shrine. Temples were not places of public worship or congregation, and only on select feast days and celebrations was a shrine carrying the statue of the god brought out for public worship. Normally, the god's domain was sealed off from the outside world and was only accessible to temple officials. Common citizens could worship private statues in their homes, and amulets offered protection against the forces of chaos.[151] After the New Kingdom, the pharaoh's role as a spiritual intermediary was de-emphasized as religious customs shifted to direct worship of the gods. As a result, priests developed a system of oracles to communicate the will of the gods directly to the people.[152]
+The Egyptians believed that every human being was composed of physical and spiritual parts or aspects. In addition to the body, each person had a šwt (shadow), a ba (personality or soul), a ka (life-force), and a name.[153] The heart, rather than the brain, was considered the seat of thoughts and emotions. After death, the spiritual aspects were released from the body and could move at will, but they required the physical remains (or a substitute, such as a statue) as a permanent home. The ultimate goal of the deceased was to rejoin his ka and ba and become one of the "blessed dead", living on as an akh, or "effective one". For this to happen, the deceased had to be judged worthy in a trial, in which the heart was weighed against a "feather of truth." If deemed worthy, the deceased could continue their existence on earth in spiritual form.[154] If they were not deemed worthy, their heart was eaten by Ammit the Devourer and they were erased from the Universe.
+The ancient Egyptians maintained an elaborate set of burial customs that they believed were necessary to ensure immortality after death. These customs involved preserving the body by mummification, performing burial ceremonies, and interring with the body goods the deceased would use in the afterlife.[144] Before the Old Kingdom, bodies buried in desert pits were naturally preserved by desiccation. The arid, desert conditions were a boon throughout the history of ancient Egypt for burials of the poor, who could not afford the elaborate burial preparations available to the elite. Wealthier Egyptians began to bury their dead in stone tombs and use artificial mummification, which involved removing the internal organs, wrapping the body in linen, and burying it in a rectangular stone sarcophagus or wooden coffin. Beginning in the Fourth Dynasty, some parts were preserved separately in canopic jars.[155]
+By the New Kingdom, the ancient Egyptians had perfected the art of mummification; the best technique took 70 days and involved removing the internal organs, removing the brain through the nose, and desiccating the body in a mixture of salts called natron. The body was then wrapped in linen with protective amulets inserted between layers and placed in a decorated anthropoid coffin. Mummies of the Late Period were also placed in painted cartonnage mummy cases. Actual preservation practices declined during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras, while greater emphasis was placed on the outer appearance of the mummy, which was decorated.[156]
+Wealthy Egyptians were buried with larger quantities of luxury items, but all burials, regardless of social status, included goods for the deceased. Funerary texts were often included in the grave, and, beginning in the New Kingdom, so were shabti statues that were believed to perform manual labor for them in the afterlife.[157] Rituals in which the deceased was magically re-animated accompanied burials. After burial, living relatives were expected to occasionally bring food to the tomb and recite prayers on behalf of the deceased.[158]
+The ancient Egyptian military was responsible for defending Egypt against foreign invasion, and for maintaining Egypt's domination in the ancient Near East. The military protected mining expeditions to the Sinai during the Old Kingdom and fought civil wars during the First and Second Intermediate Periods. The military was responsible for maintaining fortifications along important trade routes, such as those found at the city of Buhen on the way to Nubia. Forts also were constructed to serve as military bases, such as the fortress at Sile, which was a base of operations for expeditions to the Levant. In the New Kingdom, a series of pharaohs used the standing Egyptian army to attack and conquer Kush and parts of the Levant.[159]
+Typical military equipment included bows and arrows, spears, and round-topped shields made by stretching animal skin over a wooden frame. In the New Kingdom, the military began using chariots that had earlier been introduced by the Hyksos invaders. Weapons and armor continued to improve after the adoption of bronze: shields were now made from solid wood with a bronze buckle, spears were tipped with a bronze point, and the Khopesh was adopted from Asiatic soldiers.[160] The pharaoh was usually depicted in art and literature riding at the head of the army; it has been suggested that at least a few pharaohs, such as Seqenenre Tao II and his sons, did do so.[161] However, it has also been argued that "kings of this period did not personally act as frontline war leaders, fighting alongside their troops."[162] Soldiers were recruited from the general population, but during, and especially after, the New Kingdom, mercenaries from Nubia, Kush, and Libya were hired to fight for Egypt.[163]
+In technology, medicine, and mathematics, ancient Egypt achieved a relatively high standard of productivity and sophistication. Traditional empiricism, as evidenced by the Edwin Smith and Ebers papyri (c. 1600 BC), is first credited to Egypt. The Egyptians created their own alphabet and decimal system.
+Even before the Old Kingdom, the ancient Egyptians had developed a glassy material known as faience, which they treated as a type of artificial semi-precious stone. Faience is a non-clay ceramic made of silica, small amounts of lime and soda, and a colorant, typically copper.[164] The material was used to make beads, tiles, figurines, and small wares. Several methods can be used to create faience, but typically production involved application of the powdered materials in the form of a paste over a clay core, which was then fired. By a related technique, the ancient Egyptians produced a pigment known as Egyptian Blue, also called blue frit, which is produced by fusing (or sintering) silica, copper, lime, and an alkali such as natron. The product can be ground up and used as a pigment.[165]
+The ancient Egyptians could fabricate a wide variety of objects from glass with great skill, but it is not clear whether they developed the process independently.[166] It is also unclear whether they made their own raw glass or merely imported pre-made ingots, which they melted and finished. However, they did have technical expertise in making objects, as well as adding trace elements to control the color of the finished glass. A range of colors could be produced, including yellow, red, green, blue, purple, and white, and the glass could be made either transparent or opaque.[167]
+The medical problems of the ancient Egyptians stemmed directly from their environment. Living and working close to the Nile brought hazards from malaria and debilitating schistosomiasis parasites, which caused liver and intestinal damage. Dangerous wildlife such as crocodiles and hippos were also a common threat. The lifelong labors of farming and building put stress on the spine and joints, and traumatic injuries from construction and warfare all took a significant toll on the body. The grit and sand from stone-ground flour abraded teeth, leaving them susceptible to abscesses (though caries were rare).[168]
+The diets of the wealthy were rich in sugars, which promoted periodontal disease.[169] Despite the flattering physiques portrayed on tomb walls, the overweight mummies of many of the upper class show the effects of a life of overindulgence.[170] Adult life expectancy was about 35 for men and 30 for women, but reaching adulthood was difficult as about one-third of the population died in infancy.[c]
+Ancient Egyptian physicians were renowned in the ancient Near East for their healing skills, and some, such as Imhotep, remained famous long after their deaths.[171] Herodotus remarked that there was a high degree of specialization among Egyptian physicians, with some treating only the head or the stomach, while others were eye-doctors and dentists.[172] Training of physicians took place at the Per Ankh or "House of Life" institution, most notably those headquartered in Per-Bastet during the New Kingdom and at Abydos and Saïs in the Late period. Medical papyri show empirical knowledge of anatomy, injuries, and practical treatments.[173]
+Wounds were treated by bandaging with raw meat, white linen, sutures, nets, pads, and swabs soaked with honey to prevent infection,[174] while opium, thyme, and belladona were used to relieve pain. The earliest records of burn treatment describe burn dressings that use the milk from mothers of male babies. Prayers were made to the goddess Isis. Moldy bread, honey, and copper salts were also used to prevent infection from dirt in burns.[175] Garlic and onions were used regularly to promote good health and were thought to relieve asthma symptoms. Ancient Egyptian surgeons stitched wounds, set broken bones, and amputated diseased limbs, but they recognized that some injuries were so serious that they could only make the patient comfortable until death occurred.[176]
+Early Egyptians knew how to assemble planks of wood into a ship hull and had mastered advanced forms of shipbuilding as early as 3000 BC. The Archaeological Institute of America reports that the oldest planked ships known are the Abydos boats.[5] A group of 14 discovered ships in Abydos were constructed of wooden planks "sewn" together. Discovered by Egyptologist David O'Connor of New York University,[177] woven straps were found to have been used to lash the planks together,[5] and reeds or grass stuffed between the planks helped to seal the seams.[5] Because the ships are all buried together and near a mortuary belonging to Pharaoh Khasekhemwy, originally they were all thought to have belonged to him, but one of the 14 ships dates to 3000 BC, and the associated pottery jars buried with the vessels also suggest earlier dating. The ship dating to 3000 BC was 75 feet (23 m) long and is now thought to perhaps have belonged to an earlier pharaoh, perhaps one as early as Hor-Aha.[177]
+Early Egyptians also knew how to assemble planks of wood with treenails to fasten them together, using pitch for caulking the seams. The "Khufu ship", a 43.6-metre (143 ft) vessel sealed into a pit in the Giza pyramid complex at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza in the Fourth Dynasty around 2500 BC, is a full-size surviving example that may have filled the symbolic function of a solar barque. Early Egyptians also knew how to fasten the planks of this ship together with mortise and tenon joints.[5]
+Large seagoing ships are known to have been heavily used by the Egyptians in their trade with the city states of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Byblos (on the coast of modern-day Lebanon), and in several expeditions down the Red Sea to the Land of Punt.[178] In fact one of the earliest Egyptian words for a seagoing ship is a "Byblos Ship", which originally defined a class of Egyptian seagoing ships used on the Byblos run; however, by the end of the Old Kingdom, the term had come to include large seagoing ships, whatever their destination.[178]
+In 2011 archaeologists from Italy, the United States, and Egypt excavating a dried-up lagoon known as Mersa Gawasis have unearthed traces of an ancient harbor that once launched early voyages like Hatshepsut's Punt expedition onto the open ocean.[179] Some of the site's most evocative evidence for the ancient Egyptians' seafaring prowess include large ship timbers and hundreds of feet of ropes, made from papyrus, coiled in huge bundles.[179] And in 2013 a team of Franco-Egyptian archaeologists discovered what is believed to be the world's oldest port, dating back about 4500 years, from the time of King Cheops on the Red Sea coast near Wadi el-Jarf (about 110 miles south of Suez).[180]
+In 1977, an ancient north–south canal dating to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt was discovered extending from Lake Timsah to the Ballah Lakes.[181] It was dated to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt by extrapolating dates of ancient sites constructed along its course.[181][d]
+The earliest attested examples of mathematical calculations date to the predynastic Naqada period, and show a fully developed numeral system.[e] The importance of mathematics to an educated Egyptian is suggested by a New Kingdom fictional letter in which the writer proposes a scholarly competition between himself and another scribe regarding everyday calculation tasks such as accounting of land, labor, and grain.[183] Texts such as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus show that the ancient Egyptians could perform the four basic mathematical operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—use fractions, calculate the areas of rectangles, triangles, and circles and compute the volumes of boxes, columns and pyramids. They understood basic concepts of algebra and geometry, and could solve simple sets of simultaneous equations.[184]
+Mathematical notation was decimal, and based on hieroglyphic signs for each power of ten up to one million. Each of these could be written as many times as necessary to add up to the desired number; so to write the number eighty or eight hundred, the symbol for ten or one hundred was written eight times respectively.[185] Because their methods of calculation could not handle most fractions with a numerator greater than one, they had to write fractions as the sum of several fractions. For example, they resolved the fraction two-fifths into the sum of one-third + one-fifteenth. Standard tables of values facilitated this.[186] Some common fractions, however, were written with a special glyph—the equivalent of the modern two-thirds is shown on the right.[187]
+Ancient Egyptian mathematicians knew the Pythagorean theorem as an empirical formula. They were aware, for example, that a triangle had a right angle opposite the hypotenuse when its sides were in a 3–4–5 ratio.[188] They were able to estimate the area of a circle by subtracting one-ninth from its diameter and squaring the result:
+a reasonable approximation of the formula πr2.[189]
+The golden ratio seems to be reflected in many Egyptian constructions, including the pyramids, but its use may have been an unintended consequence of the ancient Egyptian practice of combining the use of knotted ropes with an intuitive sense of proportion and harmony.[190]
+A team led by Johannes Krause managed the first reliable sequencing of the genomes of 90 mummified individuals in 2017 from northern Egypt (buried near modern-day Cairo), which constituted "the first reliable data set obtained from ancient Egyptians using high-throughput DNA sequencing methods." Whilst not conclusive, because of the non-exhaustive time frame and restricted location that the mummies represent, their study nevertheless showed that these ancient Egyptians "closely resembled ancient and modern Near Eastern populations, especially those in the Levant, and had almost no DNA from sub-Saharan Africa. What's more, the genetics of the mummies remained remarkably consistent even as different powers—including Nubians, Greeks, and Romans—conquered the empire." Later, however, something did alter the genomes of Egyptians. Some 15% to 20% of modern Egyptians' DNA reflects sub-Saharan ancestry, but the ancient mummies had only 6–15% sub-Saharan DNA.[191]  They called for additional research to be undertaken. Other genetic studies show much greater levels of sub-Saharan African ancestry in the current-day populations of southern as opposed to northern Egypt,[192] and anticipate that mummies from southern Egypt would contain greater levels of sub-Saharan African ancestry than Lower Egyptian mummies.
+The culture and monuments of ancient Egypt have left a lasting legacy on the world. The cult of the goddess Isis, for example, became popular in the Roman Empire, as obelisks and other relics were transported back to Rome.[193] The Romans also imported building materials from Egypt to erect Egyptian-style structures. Early historians such as Herodotus, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus studied and wrote about the land, which Romans came to view as a place of mystery.[194]
+During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Egyptian pagan culture was in decline after the rise of Christianity and later Islam, but interest in Egyptian antiquity continued in the writings of medieval scholars such as Dhul-Nun al-Misri and al-Maqrizi.[195] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European travelers and tourists brought back antiquities and wrote stories of their journeys, leading to a wave of Egyptomania across Europe. This renewed interest sent collectors to Egypt, who took, purchased, or were given many important antiquities.[196] Napoleon arranged the first studies in Egyptology when he brought some 150 scientists and artists to study and document Egypt's natural history, which was published in the Description de l'Égypte.[197]
+In the 20th century, the Egyptian Government and archaeologists alike recognized the importance of cultural respect and integrity in excavations. The Supreme Council of Antiquities now approves and oversees all excavations, which are aimed at finding information rather than treasure. The council also supervises museums and monument reconstruction programs designed to preserve the historical legacy of Egypt.
+Tourists at the pyramid complex of Khafre near the Great Sphinx of Giza
+Frontispiece of Description de l'Égypte, published in 38 volumes between 1809 and 1829.
+Ancient Egypt portal

en/2190.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

+Georgia (/ˈdʒɔːrdʒə/) is a state in the Southeastern Region of the United States. Georgia is the 24th-largest in area and 8th most populous of the 50 United States. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, and to the west by Alabama. Its 2019 estimated population was 10,617,423, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.[4] Atlanta, a "beta(+)" global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with an estimated population of more than 6 million people in 2019,[5] is the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population.
+Founded in 1733 as a British colony, Georgia was the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established.[6] Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Colony of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.[7] From 1802 to 1804, western Georgia was split to form the Mississippi Territory, which later was admitted as the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, and was one of the original seven Confederate States.[7] Following the Civil War, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870.[7] In the post-Reconstruction era, Georgia's economy was transformed as a group of prominent politicians, businessmen, and journalists, led by Henry W. Grady, espoused the "New South" philosophy of sectional reconciliation, industrialization, and white supremacy.[8] During the 20th century, several Georgians, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., were prominent leaders during the civil rights movement.[7] Since 1945, Georgia has seen substantial population growth as part of the broader Sun Belt phenomenon. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing.[9]
+Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. The state's northernmost regions include the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the larger Appalachian Mountain system. The Piedmont plateau extends from the foothills of the Blue Ridge south to the Fall Line, an escarpment to the coastal plain defining the state's southern region. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet (1,458 m) above sea level; the lowest is the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of some high-altitude areas in the Blue Ridge, the entirety of the state has a humid subtropical climate. Of the states entirely east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area.[10]
+Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures. The British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733.[11] The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by (and named for) King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king.[12]
+The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778,[13] and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.
+In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
+In early 1861, Georgia joined the Confederacy (with secessionists having a slight majority of delegates)[14] and became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service, roughly one of every five who served.[15] In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union.
+With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering.[16] In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude blacks from politics.[17] They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration.[18] According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States (1877-1950), Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male.[19] Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
+An Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South.
+On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.[20]
+By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some in-migration by whites.[21] With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a noted civil rights leader, was elected to the state House in 1965, and served multiple terms there and in the state senate.
+Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration to ensure the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, earned admiration by writing in support of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972 Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since Reconstruction.
+In 1980, construction was completed on an expansion of what is now named Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). The busiest and most efficient airport in the world, it accommodates more than a hundred million passengers annually.[22] Employing more than 60,000 people, the airport became a major engine for economic growth.[22] With the advantages of cheap real estate, low taxes, right-to-work laws and a regulatory environment limiting government interference, the Atlanta metropolitan area became a national center of finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, logistics, and transportation companies, as well as the film, convention, and trade show businesses. As a testament to the city's growing international profile, in 1990 the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of Atlanta's status as a transportation hub, in 1991 UPS established its headquarters in a suburb. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York or Chicago.
+Beginning from the Atlantic Ocean, the state's eastern border with South Carolina runs up the Savannah River, northwest to its origin at the confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers. It then continues up the Tugaloo (originally Tugalo) and into the Chattooga River, its most significant tributary. These bounds were decided in the 1797 Treaty of Beaufort, and tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in the two Georgia v. South Carolina cases in 1923 and 1989.[citation needed]
+The border then takes a sharp turn around the tip of Rabun County, at latitude 35°N, though from this point it diverges slightly south (due to inaccuracies in the original survey). This northern border was originally the Georgia and North Carolina border all the way to the Mississippi River, until Tennessee was divided from North Carolina, and the Yazoo companies induced the legislature of Georgia to pass an act, approved by the governor in 1795, to sell the greater part of Georgia's territory presently comprising Alabama and Mississippi.[23]
+The state's western border runs in a straight line south-southeastward from a point southwest of Chattanooga, to meet the Chattahoochee River near West Point. It continues downriver to the point where it joins the Flint River (the confluence of the two forming Florida's Apalachicola River); the southern border goes almost due east and very slightly south, in a straight line to the St. Mary's River, which then forms the remainder of the boundary back to the ocean.[citation needed]
+The water boundaries are still set to be the original thalweg of the rivers. Since then, several have been inundated by lakes created by dams, including the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint point now under Lake Seminole.[citation needed]
+Georgia state legislators have claimed that in an 1818 survey the state's border with Tennessee was erroneously placed one mile (1.6 km) farther south than intended, and they still dispute it. Correction of this inaccuracy would allow Georgia access to water from the Tennessee River.[24]
+Each region has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the Ridge and Valley, which lies in the northwest corner of the state, includes limestone, sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, which have yielded construction-grade limestone, barite, ocher, and small amounts of coal.
+The state of Georgia has approximately 250 tree species and 58 protected plants. Georgia's native trees include red cedar, a variety of pines, oaks, hollies, cypress, sweetgum, scaly-bark and white hickories, and sabal palmetto. East Georgia is in the subtropical coniferous forest biome and conifer species as other broadleaf evergreen flora make up the majority of the southern and coastal regions. Yellow jasmine and mountain laurel make up just a few of the flowering shrubs in the state.
+White-tailed (Virginia) deer are in nearly all counties. The northern mockingbird and brown thrasher are among the 160 bird species that live in the state.[25]
+Reptiles include the eastern diamondback, copperhead, and cottonmouth snakes as well as alligators; amphibians include salamanders, frogs and toads. There are about 79 species of reptile and 63 amphibians known to live in Georgia.[25]
+The most popular freshwater game fish are trout, bream, bass, and catfish, all but the last of which are produced in state hatcheries for restocking. Popular saltwater game fish include red drum, spotted seatrout, flounder, and tarpon. Porpoises, whales, shrimp, oysters, and blue crabs are found inshore and offshore of the Georgia coast.[25]
+The majority of the state is primarily a humid subtropical climate. Hot and humid summers are typical, except at the highest elevations. The entire state, including the North Georgia mountains, receives moderate to heavy precipitation, which varies from 45 inches (1143 mm) in central Georgia[26] to approximately 75 inches (1905 mm) around the northeast part of the state.[27] The degree to which the weather of a certain region of Georgia is subtropical depends on the latitude, its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, and the elevation. The latter factor is felt chiefly in the mountainous areas of the northern part of the state, which are farther away from the ocean and can be 4500 feet (1350 m) above sea level. The USDA plant hardiness zones for Georgia range from zone 6b (no colder than −5 °F (−21 °C) ) in the Blue Ridge Mountains to zone 8b (no colder than 15 °F (−9 °C) ) along the Atlantic coast and Florida border.[28]
+The highest temperature ever recorded is 112 °F (44.4 °C) in Louisville on July 24, 1952,[29] while the lowest is −17 °F (−27.2 °C) in northern Floyd County on January 27, 1940.[30] Georgia is one of the leading states in frequency of tornadoes, though they are rarely stronger than EF1. Although tornadoes striking the city are very rare,[31] an EF2 tornado[31] hit downtown Atlanta on March 14, 2008, causing moderate to severe damage to various buildings. With a coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, Georgia is also vulnerable to hurricanes, although direct hurricane strikes were rare during the 20th century. Georgia often is affected by hurricanes that strike the Florida Panhandle, weaken over land, and bring strong tropical storm winds and heavy rain to the interior, a recent example being Hurricane Michael,[32] as well as hurricanes that come close to the Georgia coastline, brushing the coast on their way north without ever making landfall. Hurricane Matthew of 2016 and Hurricane Dorian of 2019 did just that.
+The United States Census Bureau estimates that in 2019 Georgia had a population of 10,617,423, which was an increase of 97,948 from the previous year, and an increase of 929,770 (9.60%) since 2010.[35] This includes a natural increase since the last census of 438,939 (849,414 births minus 410,475 deaths) and an increase from net migration of 606,673 people into the state. Immigration resulted in a net increase of 228,415 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 378,258 people.
+As of 2010[update], the number of illegal immigrants living in Georgia more than doubled to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009, according to a federal report. That gave Georgia the greatest percentage increase among the 10 states with the biggest illegal immigrant populations during those years.[36] Georgia has banned sanctuary cities.[37]
+There were 743,000 veterans in 2009.[38]
+According to the 2010 United States Census, Georgia had a population of 9,687,653. In terms of race and ethnicity, the state was 59.7% White (55.9% Non-Hispanic White alone), 30.5% Black or African American, 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.2% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 4.0% from some other race, and 2.1% from two or more races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up 8.8% of the population.[39]
+As of 2011[update], 58.8% of Georgia's population younger than age 1 were minorities (meaning they had at least one parent who was not non-Hispanic white) compared to other states like California with 75.1%, New York with 55.6%, and Texas with 69.8%.[43]
+The largest European ancestry groups are:
+In the 1980 census 1,584,303 Georgians claimed English ancestry out of a total state population of 3,994,817, making them 40% of the state, and the largest ethnic group at the time.[46] Today, many of these same people claiming they are of "American" ancestry are actually of English descent, and some are of Scots-Irish descent; however, their families have lived in the state for so long, in many cases since the colonial period, that they choose to identify simply as having "American" ancestry or do not in fact know their own ancestry. Their ancestry primarily goes back to the original thirteen colonies and for this reason many of them today simply claim "American" ancestry, though they are of predominantly English ancestry.[47][48][49][50]
+As of 2004[update], 7.7% of Georgia's population was reported as under 5 years of age, 26.4% under 18, and 9.6% were 65 or older. Also, as of 2004[update], females made up approximately 50.6% of the population and African Americans made up approximately 29.6%.
+Historically, about half of Georgia's population was composed of African Americans who, before the Civil War, were almost exclusively enslaved. The Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North from 1914 to 1970 reduced the African American population.[51]
+Georgia had the second-fastest-growing Asian population growth in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000, more than doubling in size during the ten-year period.[52] In addition, according to census estimates, Georgia ranks third among the states in terms of the percent of the total population that is African American (after Mississippi and Louisiana) and third in numeric Black population after New York and Florida.
+Georgia is the state with the third-lowest percentage of older people (65 or older), at 12.8 percent (as of 2015[update]).[53]
+The colonial settlement of large numbers of Scottish American, English American and Scotch-Irish Americans in the mountains and piedmont, and coastal settlement by some English Americans and African Americans, have strongly influenced the state's culture in food, language and music. The concentration of Africans imported to coastal areas in the 18th century repeatedly from rice-growing regions of West Africa led to the development of Gullah-Geechee language and culture in the Low Country among African Americans. They share a unique heritage in which African traditions of food, religion and culture were continued more than in some other areas. In the creolization of Southern culture, their foodways became an integral part of all Southern cooking in the Low Country.[54][55]
+As of 2010[update], 87.35% (7,666,663) of Georgia residents age 5 and older spoke English at home as a primary language, while 7.42% (651,583) spoke Spanish, 0.51% (44,702) Korean, 0.44% (38,244) Vietnamese, 0.42% (36,679) French, 0.38% (33,009) Chinese (which includes Mandarin), and German, which was spoken as a main language by 0.29% (23,351) of the population over the age of  5. In total, 12.65% (1,109,888) of Georgia's population age 5 and older spoke a mother language other than English.[56]
+Atlanta, located in north-central Georgia at the Eastern Continental Divide, has been Georgia's capital city since 1868. It is the most populous city in Georgia, with an estimated 2019 population of just over 506,000.[57]
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the cultural and economic center of the Southeast; its estimated population in 2019 was over 6 million, or 57% of Georgia's total. Atlanta is the nation's ninth largest metropolitan area.[58]
+The state has seventeen cities with populations above 50,000, based on 2019 U.S. Census estimates.[57]
+* In 2014, the City of Macon and most of unincorporated Bibb County officially merged. Macon joined Columbus, Augusta, Athens, Cusseta and Georgetown as consolidated city-county governments in Georgia.
+Along with the rest of the Southeast, Georgia's population continues to grow rapidly, with primary gains concentrated in urban areas. The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area added 1.23 million people (24 percent) between 2000 and 2010, and Atlanta rose in rank from the eleventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States to the ninth-largest.[59]
+The composition of religious affiliation in Georgia is 70% Protestant, 9% Catholic, 1% Mormon, 1% Jewish, 0.5% Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, and 0.5% Hindu. Atheists, deists, agnostics, and other unaffiliated people make up 13% of the population.[60] The largest Christian denominations by number of adherents in 2010 were the Southern Baptist Convention with 1,759,317; the United Methodist Church with 619,394; and the Roman Catholic Church with 596,384. Non-denominational Evangelical Protestant had 566,782 members, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) has 175,184 members, and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. has 172,982 members.[61] The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the largest Presbyterian body in the state, with 300 congregations and 100,000 members. The other large body, Presbyterian Church in America, had at its founding date 14 congregations and 2,800 members; in 2010 it counted 139 congregations and 32,000 members.[62][63] The Roman Catholic Church is noteworthy in Georgia's urban areas, and includes the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah. Georgia is home to the largest Hindu temple in the United States, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, located in the suburb city of Lilburn. Georgia is home to several historic synagogues including The Temple (Atlanta), Congregation Beth Jacob (Atlanta), and Congregation Mickve Israel (Savannah). Chabad and the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute are also active in the state.[64][65]
+As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Georgia's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power.[67] Executive authority in the state rests with the governor, currently Brian Kemp (Republican). Both the Governor of Georgia and lieutenant governor are elected on separate ballots to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the executive officials who comprise the governor's cabinet are elected by the citizens of Georgia rather than appointed by the governor.
+Legislative authority resides in the General Assembly, composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate, while members of the House of Representatives select their own Speaker. The Georgia Constitution mandates a maximum of 56 senators, elected from single-member districts, and a minimum of 180 representatives, apportioned among representative districts (which sometimes results in more than one representative per district); there are currently 56 senators and 180 representatives. The term of office for senators and representatives is two years.[68] The laws enacted by the General Assembly are codified in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.
+State judicial authority rests with the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, which have statewide authority.[69] In addition, there are smaller courts which have more limited geographical jurisdiction, including Superior Courts, State Courts, Juvenile Courts, Magistrate Courts and Probate Courts. Justices of the Supreme Court and judges of the Court of Appeals are elected statewide by the citizens in non-partisan elections to six-year terms. Judges for the smaller courts are elected to four-year terms by the state's citizens who live within that court's jurisdiction.
+Georgia consists of 159 counties, second only to Texas, with 254.[70] Georgia had 161 counties until the end of 1931, when Milton and Campbell were merged into the existing Fulton. Some counties have been named for prominent figures in both American and Georgian history, and many bear names with Native American origin. Counties in Georgia have their own elected legislative branch, usually called the Board of Commissioners, which usually also has executive authority in the county.[71] Several counties have a sole Commissioner form of government, with legislative and executive authority vested in a single person. Georgia is the only state with current Sole Commissioner counties. Georgia's Constitution provides all counties and cities with "home rule" authority. The county commissions have considerable power to pass legislation within their county, as a municipality would.
+Georgia recognizes all local units of government as cities, so every incorporated town is legally a city. Georgia does not provide for townships or independent cities, though there have been bills proposed in the Legislature to provide for townships;[72] it does allow consolidated city-county governments by local referendum. All of Georgia's second-tier cities except Savannah have now formed consolidated city-county governments by referendum: Columbus (in 1970), Athens (1990), Augusta (1995), and Macon (2012). (Augusta and Athens have excluded one or more small, incorporated towns within their consolidated boundaries; Columbus and Macon eventually absorbed all smaller incorporated entities within their consolidated boundaries.) The small town of Cusseta adopted a consolidated city-county government after it merged with unincorporated Chattahoochee County in 2003. Three years later, in 2006, the town of Georgetown consolidated with the rest of Quitman County.
+There is no true metropolitan government in Georgia, though the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and Georgia Regional Transportation Authority do provide some services, and the ARC must approve all major land development projects in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
+Georgia has voted Republican in six consecutive presidential elections since 1996.
+Until 1964, Georgia's state government had the longest unbroken record of single-party dominance, by the Democratic Party, of any state in the Union. This record was established largely due to the disenfranchisement of most blacks and many poor whites by the state in its constitution and laws in the early 20th century. Some elements, such as requiring payment of poll taxes and passing literacy tests, prevented blacks from registering to vote; their exclusion from the political system lasted into the 1960s and reduced the Republican Party to a non-competitive status in the early 20th century.[73]
+White Democrats regained power after Reconstruction due in part to the efforts of some using intimidation and violence, but this method came into disrepute.[74] In 1900, shortly before Georgia adopted a disfranchising constitutional amendment in 1908, blacks comprised 47% of the state's population.[75]
+The whites dealt with this problem of potential political power by the 1908 amendment, which in practice disenfranchised blacks and poor whites, nearly half of the state population. It required that any male at least 21 years of age wanting to register to vote must also: (a) be of good character and able to pass a test on citizenship, (b) be able to read and write provisions of the U.S. and Georgia constitutions, or (c) own at least 40 acres of land or $500 in property. Any Georgian who had fought in any war from the American Revolution through the Spanish–American War was exempted from these additional qualifications. More importantly, any Georgian descended from a veteran of any of these wars also was exempted. Because by 1908 many white Georgia males were grandsons of veterans and/or owned the required property, the exemption and the property requirement basically allowed only well-to-do whites to vote. The qualifications of good character, citizenship knowledge, and literacy (all determined subjectively by white registrars), and property ownership were used to disqualify most blacks and poor whites, preventing them from registering to vote. The voter rolls dropped dramatically.[74][76] In the early 20th century, Progressives promoted electoral reform and reducing the power of ward bosses to clean up politics. Their additional rules, such as the eight-box law, continued to effectively close out people who were illiterate.[17] White, one-party rule was solidified.
+For more than 130 years, from 1872 to 2003, Georgians nominated and elected only white Democratic governors, and white Democrats held the majority of seats in the General Assembly.[77] Most of the Democrats elected throughout these years were Southern Democrats, who were fiscally and socially conservative by national standards.[78][79] This voting pattern continued after the segregationist period.[80]
+Legal segregation was ended by passage of federal legislation in the 1960s. According to the 1960 census, the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American was 28%; hundreds of thousands of blacks had left the state in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. New white residents arrived through migration and immigration. Following support from the national Democratic Party for the civil rights movement and especially civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, most African-American voters, as well as other minority voters, have largely supported the Democratic Party in Georgia.[81] In the decades since the late 20th century, the conservative white-majority voters have increasingly supported Republicans for national and state offices.
+In 2002, incumbent moderate Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was defeated by Republican Sonny Perdue, a state legislator and former Democrat. While Democrats retained control of the State House, they lost their majority in the Senate when four Democrats switched parties. They lost the House in the 2004 election. Republicans then controlled all three partisan elements of the state government.
+Even before 2002, the state had become increasingly supportive of Republicans in Presidential elections. It has supported a Democrat for president only three times since 1960. In 1976 and 1980, native son Jimmy Carter carried the state; in 1992, the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton narrowly won the state. Generally, Republicans are strongest in the predominantly white suburban (especially the Atlanta suburbs) and rural portions of the state.[82] Many of these areas were represented by conservative Democrats in the state legislature well into the 21st century. One of the most conservative of these was U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald, former head of the John Birch Society, who died when the Soviet Union shot down KAL 007 near Sakhalin Island. Democratic candidates have tended to win a higher percentage of the vote in the areas where black voters are most numerous,[82] as well as in the cities among liberal urban populations (especially Atlanta and Athens), and the central and southwestern portion of the state.
+The ascendancy of the Republican Party in Georgia and in the South in general resulted in Georgia U.S. House of Representatives member Newt Gingrich being elected as Speaker of the House following the election of a Republican majority in the House in 1994. Gingrich served as Speaker until 1999, when he resigned in the aftermath of the loss of House seats held by members of the GOP. Gingrich mounted an unsuccessful bid for president in the 2012 election, but withdrew after winning only the South Carolina and Georgia primaries.
+In 2008, Democrat Jim Martin ran against incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss failed to acquire the necessary 50 percent of votes due to a Libertarian Party candidate receiving the remainder of votes. In the runoff election held on December 2, 2008, Chambliss became the second Georgia Republican to be reelected to the U.S. Senate.
+In the 2018 elections, the governor remained a Republican (by 54,723 votes against a democratic black female, Stacey Abrams), Republicans lost eight seats in the Georgia House of Representatives (winning 106), while Democrats gained ten (winning 74), Republicans lost two seats in the Georgia Senate (winning 35 seats), while Democrats gained two seats (winning 21), and five Democrat U.S. Representatives were elected with Republicans winning nine seats (one winning with just 419 votes over the Democratic challenger, and one seat being lost).[83][84][85]
+In the last three presidential elections as of 2018, the Republican candidate has won Georgia by approximately five to eight points over the Democratic nominee, at least once for each election being narrower than margins recorded in some states that have flipped within that timeframe, such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Therefore, it could potentially be regarded as a swing state in future elections should voter preferences only shift slightly.
+During the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia made significant changes in civil rights and governance. As in many other states, its legislature had not reapportioned congressional districts according to population from 1931 to after the 1960 census. Problems of malapportionment in the state legislature, where rural districts had outsize power in relation to urban districts, such as Atlanta's, were corrected after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). The court ruled that congressional districts had to be reapportioned to have essentially equal populations.
+A related case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), required state legislatures to end their use of geographical districts or counties in favor of "one man, one vote"; that is, districts based upon approximately equal populations, to be reviewed and changed as necessary after each census. These changes resulted in residents of Atlanta and other urban areas gaining political power in Georgia in proportion to their populations.[86] From the mid-1960s, the voting electorate increased after African Americans' rights to vote were enforced under civil rights law.
+Economic growth through this period was dominated by Atlanta and its region. It was a bedrock of the emerging "New South". From the late 20th century, Atlanta attracted headquarters and relocated workers of national companies, becoming more diverse, liberal and cosmopolitan than many areas of the state.
+In the 21st century, many conservative Democrats, including former U.S. Senator and governor Zell Miller, decided to support Republicans. The state's socially conservative bent results in wide support for such measures as restrictions on abortion. In 2004, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages was approved by 76% of voters.[87] However, after the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, all Georgia counties came into full compliance, recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state.[88]
+Georgia's 2018 total gross state product was $602 billion.[89] For years Georgia as a state has had the highest credit rating by Standard & Poor's (AAA) and is one of only 15 states with a AAA rating.[90] If Georgia were a stand-alone country, it would be the 28th largest economy in the world, based on data from 2005.[91]
+There are 17 Fortune 500 companies and 26 Fortune 1000 companies with headquarters in Georgia, including Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, TSYS, Delta Air Lines, Aflac, Southern Company, Anthem Inc., and SunTrust Banks.
+Atlanta boasts the world's busiest airport, as measured both by passenger traffic and by aircraft traffic.[93][94] Also, the Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport and fastest-growing container seaport in North America, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95]
+Atlanta has a large effect on the state of Georgia, the Southeastern United States, and beyond. Atlanta has been the site of growth in finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, service, logistics, transportation, film, communications, convention and trade show businesses and industries, while tourism is important to the economy. Atlanta is a global city, also called world city or sometimes alpha city or world center, as a city generally considered to be an important node in the global economic system.
+For the five years through November 2017, Georgia has been ranked the top state (number 1) in the nation to do business, and has been recognized as number 1 for business and labor climate in the nation, number 1 in business climate in the nation, number 1 in the nation in workforce training and as having a "Best in Class" state economic development agency.[96][97]
+In 2016, Georgia had median annual income per person of between $50,000 and $59,999, which is in inflation-adjusted dollars for 2016. The U.S. median annual income for the entire nation is $57,617. This lies within the range of Georgia's median annual income.[98]
+Widespread farms produce peanuts, corn, and soybeans across middle and south Georgia. The state is the number one producer of pecans in the world, with the region around Albany in southwest Georgia being the center of Georgia's pecan production. Gainesville in northeast Georgia touts itself as the Poultry Capital of the World. Georgia is in the top five blueberry producers in the United States.[99]
+Major products in the mineral industry include a variety of clays, stones, sands and the clay palygorskite, known as attapulgite.
+While many textile jobs moved overseas, there is still a textile industry located around the cities of Rome, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and along the I-75 corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Historically it started along the fall line in the Piedmont, where factories were powered by waterfalls and rivers. It includes the towns of Cartersville, Calhoun, Ringgold and Dalton[100]
+In November 2009, Kia started production in Georgia at the first U.S. Kia Motors plant, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia in West Point.
+Industrial products include textiles and apparel, transportation equipment, food processing, paper products, chemicals and products, and electric equipment.
+Georgia was ranked the number 2 state for infrastructure and global access by Area Development magazine.[101]
+The Georgia Ports Authority owns and operates four ports in the state: Port of Savannah, Port of Brunswick, Port Bainbridge, and Port Columbus. The Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport in the United States, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95] The Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal is the largest single container terminal in North America.[102] Several major companies including Target, IKEA, and Heineken operate distribution centers in close proximity to the Port of Savannah.
+Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport moves over 650,000 tons of cargo annually through three cargo complexes (two million square feet of floor space). It has nearby cold storage for perishables; it is the only airport in the Southeast with USDA-approved cold-treatment capabilities. Delta Air Lines also offers an on-airport refrigeration facility for perishable cargo, and a 250-acre Foreign Trade Zone is located at the airport.[103]
+Georgia is a major railway hub, has the most extensive rail system in the Southeast, and has the service of two Class I railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, plus 24 short-line railroads. Georgia is ranked the #3 state in the nation for rail accessibility. Rail shipments include intermodal, bulk, automotive and every other type of shipment.[104]
+Georgia has an extensive interstate highway system including 1,200 miles of interstate highway and 20,000 miles of federal and state highways that facilitate the efficient movement of more than $620 billion of cargo by truck each year. Georgia's six interstates connect to 80 percent of the U.S. population within a two-day truck drive. More than $14 billion in funding has been approved[when?] for new roadway infrastructure.[105]
+Southern Congressmen have attracted major investment by the U.S. military in the state. The several installations include Moody Air Force Base, Fort Stewart, Hunter Army Airfield, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Fort Benning, Robins Air Force Base, Fort Gordon, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Coast Guard Air Station Savannah and Coast Guard Station Brunswick. These installations command numerous jobs and business for related contractors.
+Georgia's electricity generation and consumption are among the highest in the United States, with natural gas being the primary electrical generation fuel, followed by coal. The state also has two nuclear power facilities, Plant Hatch and Plant Vogtle, which contribute almost one fourth of Georgia's electricity generation, and an additional two nuclear power plants are under construction[when?] at Plant Vogtle. In 2013, the generation mix was 39% gas, 35% coal, 23% nuclear, 3% hydro and other renewable sources. The leading area of energy consumption is the industrial sector because Georgia "is a leader in the energy-intensive wood and paper products industry".[106] Solar generated energy is becoming more in use with solar energy generators currently installed ranking Georgia 15th in the country in installed solar capacity. In 2013, $189 million was invested in Georgia to install solar for home, business and utility use representing a 795% increase over the previous year.[107]
+Georgia has a progressive income tax structure with six brackets of state income tax rates that range from 1% to 6%. In 2009, Georgians paid 9% of their income in state and local taxes, compared to the U.S. average of 9.8% of income.[108] This ranks Georgia 25th among the states for total state and local tax burden.[108] The state sales tax in Georgia is 4%[109] with additional percentages added through local options (e.g. special-purpose local-option sales tax or SPLOST), but there is no sales tax on prescription drugs, certain medical devices, or food items for home consumption.[110]
+The state legislature may allow municipalities to institute local sales taxes and special local taxes, such as the 2% SPLOST tax and the 1% sales tax for MARTA serviced counties. Excise taxes are levied on alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel. Owners of real property in Georgia pay property tax to their county. All taxes are collected by the Georgia Department of Revenue and then properly distributed according to any agreements that each county has with its cities.
+The Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office promotes filming in the state.[111] Since 1972, seven hundred film and television projects have been filmed on location in Georgia.[112] Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state location with the most feature films produced. In FY2017, film and television production in Georgia had an economic impact of $9.5 billion.[113] Atlanta now is even called the "Hollywood of the South".[114] Television shows like Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are filmed in the state.[115] Movies too, such as Passengers, Forrest Gump, Contagion, Hidden Figures, Sully, Baby Driver, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Birds of Prey and many more, were filmed around Georgia.[116][117]
+In the Atlanta area, World of Coke, Georgia Aquarium, Zoo Atlanta and Stone Mountain are important tourist attractions.[118][119] Stone Mountain is Georgia's "most popular attraction"; receiving more than four million tourists per year.[120][121] The Georgia Aquarium, in Atlanta, was the largest aquarium in the world in 2010 according to Guinness World Records.[122]
+Callaway Gardens, in western Georgia, is a family resort.[123] The area is also popular with golfers.
+The Savannah Historic District attracts more than eleven million tourists each year.[124]
+The Golden Isles is a string of barrier islands off the Atlantic coast of Georgia near Brunswick that includes beaches, golf courses and the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
+Several sites honor the lives and careers of noted American leaders: the Little White House in Warm Springs, which served as the summer residence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he was being treated for polio; President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains and the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta; the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta, which is the final resting place of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King; and Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King preached.
+Georgia's major fine art museums include the High Museum of Art and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, both in Atlanta; the Georgia Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens; Telfair Museum of Art and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah; and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta.[125]
+The state theatre of Georgia is the Springer Opera House located in Columbus.
+The Atlanta Opera brings opera to Georgia stages.[126] The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the most widely recognized orchestra and largest arts organization in the southeastern United States.[127]
+There are a number of performing arts venues in the state, among the largest are the Fox Theatre, and the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, both on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta as well as the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, located in Northwest Atlanta.
+Authors have grappled with Georgia's complex history. Popular novels related to this include Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
+A number of noted authors, poets and playwrights have lived in Georgia, such as James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, Sidney Lanier, Frank Yerby and Lewis Grizzard.[128]
+Well-known television shows set in Atlanta include, from Tyler Perry Studios, House of Payne and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the CBS sitcom Designing Women, Matlock, the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva, Rectify and numerous HGTV original productions.
+The Dukes of Hazzard, a 1980s TV show, was set in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia. The first five episodes were shot on location in Conyers and Covington, Georgia as well as some locations in Atlanta. Production was then moved to Burbank, California.[citation needed]
+Also filmed in Georgia is The Vampire Diaries, using Covington as the setting for the fictional Mystic Falls.
+A number of notable musicians in various genres of popular music are from Georgia. Among them are Ray Charles (whose many hits include "Georgia on My Mind", now the official state song), and Gladys Knight (known for her Georgia-themed song, "Midnight Train to Georgia").
+Rock groups from Georgia include the Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Black Crowes, and The Allman Brothers.
+The university city of Athens sparked an influential rock music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Among the groups achieving their initial prominence there were R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and the B-52's.
+Since the 1990s, various hip-hop and R&B musicians have included top-selling artists such as Outkast, Usher, Ludacris, TLC, B.o.B., and Ciara. Atlanta is mentioned in a number of these artists' tracks, such as Usher's "A-Town Down" reference in his 2004 hit "Yeah!" (which also features Atlanta artists Lil Jon and Ludacris), Ludacris' "Welcome to Atlanta", Outkast's album "ATLiens", and B.o.B.'s multiple references to Decatur, Georgia, as in his hit song "Strange Clouds".
+Two movies, both set in Atlanta, won Oscars for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Other films set in Georgia include Deliverance (1972), Parental Guidance (2012), and Vacation.
+Sports in Georgia include professional teams in nearly all major sports, Olympic Games contenders and medalists, collegiate teams in major and small-school conferences and associations, and active amateur teams and individual sports. The state of Georgia has teams in four major professional leagues—the Atlanta Braves of Major League Baseball, the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League, the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association, and Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer.
+The Georgia Bulldogs (Southeastern Conference), Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Atlantic Coast Conference), Georgia State Panthers and Georgia Southern Eagles (Sun Belt Conference) are Georgia's NCAA Division I FBS football teams, having won multiple national championships between them. The Georgia Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets have a historical rivalry in college football known as Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, and the Georgia State Panthers and the Georgia Southern Eagles have recently developed their own rivalry.
+The 1996 Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta. The stadium that was built to host various Olympic events was converted to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves through 2016.
+The Masters golf tournament, the first of the PGA tour's four "majors", is held annually the second weekend of April at the Augusta National Golf Club.
+The Atlanta Motor Speedway hosts the Dixie 500 NASCAR Cup Series stock car race and Road Atlanta the Petit Le Mans endurance sports car race.
+Atlanta's Georgia Dome hosted Super Bowl XXVIII in 1994 and Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. The Georgia Dome hosted the NCAA Final Four Men's Basketball National Championship in 2002, 2007, and 2013.[129]
+It hosted WWE's WrestleMania XXVII in 2011, an event which set an attendance record of 71,617. The dome was also the venue of the annual Chick-fil-A Bowl post-season college football games. Since 2017, they have been held at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium along with the FIRST World Championships.
+Professional baseball's Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was from Narrows and was nicknamed the "Georgia Peach".[130]
+There are 48 state parks, 15 historic sites, and numerous wildlife preserves under supervision of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.[131] Other historic sites and parks are supervised by the National Park Service and include the Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville; Appalachian National Scenic Trail; Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area near Atlanta; Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park at Fort Oglethorpe; Cumberland Island National Seashore near St. Marys; Fort Frederica National Monument on St. Simons Island; Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah; Jimmy Carter National Historic Site near Plains; Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park near Kennesaw; Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta; Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon; Trail of Tears National Historic Trail; and the Okefenokee Swamp in Waycross, Georgia[132]
+Outdoor recreational activities include hiking along the Appalachian Trail; Civil War Heritage Trails; rock climbing and whitewater kayaking.[133][134][135][136] Other outdoor activities include hunting and fishing.
+Georgia county and city public school systems are administered by school boards with members elected at the local level. As of 2013[update], all but 19 of 181 boards are elected from single-member districts. Residents and activist groups in Fayette County, Georgia sued the board of commissioners and school board for maintaining an election system based on at-large voting, which tended to increase the power of the majority and effectively prevented minority participation on elected local boards for nearly 200 years.[137] A change to single-member districts has resulted in the African-American minority being able to elect representatives of its choice.
+Georgia high schools (grades nine through twelve) are required to administer a standardized, multiple choice End of Course Test, or EOCT, in each of eight core subjects: algebra, geometry, U.S. history, economics, biology, physical science, ninth grade literature and composition, and American literature. The official purpose of the tests is to assess "specific content knowledge and skills". Although a minimum test score is not required for the student to receive credit in the course, completion of the test is mandatory. The EOCT score accounts for 15% of a student's grade in the course.[138] The Georgia Milestone evaluation is taken by public school students in the state.[139]
+Georgia has 85 public colleges, universities, and technical colleges in addition to more than 45 private institutes of higher learning. Among Georgia's public universities is the flagship research university, the University of Georgia, founded in 1785 as the country's oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education.[140] The University System of Georgia is the presiding body over public post-secondary education in the state. The System includes 29 institutions of higher learning and is governed by the Georgia Board of Regents. Georgia's workforce of more than 6.3 million is constantly refreshed by the growing number of people who move there along with the 90,000 graduates from the universities, colleges and technical colleges across the state, including the highly ranked University of Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University and Emory University.[141]
+The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, is available to all Georgia residents who have graduated from high school or earned a General Educational Development certificate. The student must maintain a 3.2 or higher grade point average and attend a public college or university in the state.
+The Georgia Historical Society, an independent educational and research institution, has a research center located in Savannah. The research center's library and archives hold the oldest collection of materials related to Georgia history in the nation.
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the ninth largest media market in the United States as ranked by Nielsen Media Research. The state's other top markets are Savannah (95th largest), Augusta (115th largest), and Columbus (127th largest).[142]
+There are 48 television broadcast stations in Georgia including TBS, TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, CNN and Headline News, all founded by notable Georgia resident Ted Turner. The Weather Channel also has its headquarters in Atlanta.
+By far, the largest daily newspaper in Georgia is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a daily readership of 195,592 and a Sunday readership of 397,925.[143][144] Other large dailies include The Augusta Chronicle, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, The Telegraph (formerly The Macon Telegraph) and the Savannah Morning News.
+WSB-AM in Atlanta was the first licensed radio station in the southeastern United States, signing on in 1922. Georgia Public Radio has been in service since 1984[145][146] and, with the exception of Atlanta, it broadcasts daily on several FM (and one AM) stations across the state. Georgia Public Radio reaches nearly all of Georgia (with the exception of the Atlanta area, which is served by WABE).
+WSB-TV in Atlanta is the state's oldest television station, having begun operations in 1948. WSB was only the second such operation founded in the Southern U.S., trailing only WTVR in Richmond, Virginia.[citation needed]
+Transportation in Georgia is overseen by the Georgia Department of Transportation, a part of the executive branch of the state government. Georgia's major Interstate Highways are I-20, I-75, I-85, and I-95. On March 18, 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution naming the portion of Interstate Highway 75, which runs from the Chattahoochee River northward to the Tennessee state line the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway. Larry McDonald, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, had been on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983.
+Georgia's primary commercial airport is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), the world's busiest airport.[147] In addition to Hartsfield–Jackson, there are eight other airports serving major commercial traffic in Georgia. Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport is the second-busiest airport in the state as measured by passengers served, and is the only additional international airport. Other commercial airports (ranked in order of passengers served) are located in Augusta, Columbus, Albany, Macon, Brunswick, Valdosta, and Athens.[148]
+The Georgia Ports Authority manages two deepwater seaports, at Savannah and Brunswick, and two river ports, at Bainbridge and Columbus. The Port of Savannah is a major U.S. seaport on the Atlantic coast.
+The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the principal rapid transit system in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Formed in 1971 as strictly a bus system, MARTA operates a network of bus routes linked to a rapid transit system consisting of 48 miles (77 km) of rail track with 38 train stations. MARTA operates almost exclusively in Fulton and DeKalb counties, with bus service to two destinations in Cobb county and the Cumberland Transfer Center next to the Cumberland Mall, and a single rail station in Clayton County at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. MARTA also operates a separate paratransit service for disabled customers. As of 2009[update], the average total daily ridership for the system (bus and rail) was 482,500 passengers.[149]
+The state has 151 general hospitals, more than 15,000 doctors and almost 6,000 dentists.[150] The state is ranked forty-first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise.[151]
+Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Georgia, was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929. He was a civil rights movement leader fighting for rights for African Americans and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.[152] Mordecai Sheftall, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the American Revolution, was born and lived his life in Georgia.[153]
+Reference: Georgia Symbols[154]
+Coordinates: 33°00′N 83°30′W / 33°N 83.5°W / 33; -83.5

en/2191.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@


1	+ Georgia usually refers to:
2	+
3	+ Georgia may also refer to:

en/2192.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

+Georgia (/ˈdʒɔːrdʒə/) is a state in the Southeastern Region of the United States. Georgia is the 24th-largest in area and 8th most populous of the 50 United States. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, and to the west by Alabama. Its 2019 estimated population was 10,617,423, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.[4] Atlanta, a "beta(+)" global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with an estimated population of more than 6 million people in 2019,[5] is the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population.
+Founded in 1733 as a British colony, Georgia was the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established.[6] Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Colony of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.[7] From 1802 to 1804, western Georgia was split to form the Mississippi Territory, which later was admitted as the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, and was one of the original seven Confederate States.[7] Following the Civil War, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870.[7] In the post-Reconstruction era, Georgia's economy was transformed as a group of prominent politicians, businessmen, and journalists, led by Henry W. Grady, espoused the "New South" philosophy of sectional reconciliation, industrialization, and white supremacy.[8] During the 20th century, several Georgians, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., were prominent leaders during the civil rights movement.[7] Since 1945, Georgia has seen substantial population growth as part of the broader Sun Belt phenomenon. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing.[9]
+Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. The state's northernmost regions include the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the larger Appalachian Mountain system. The Piedmont plateau extends from the foothills of the Blue Ridge south to the Fall Line, an escarpment to the coastal plain defining the state's southern region. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet (1,458 m) above sea level; the lowest is the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of some high-altitude areas in the Blue Ridge, the entirety of the state has a humid subtropical climate. Of the states entirely east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area.[10]
+Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures. The British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733.[11] The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by (and named for) King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king.[12]
+The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778,[13] and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.
+In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
+In early 1861, Georgia joined the Confederacy (with secessionists having a slight majority of delegates)[14] and became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service, roughly one of every five who served.[15] In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union.
+With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering.[16] In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude blacks from politics.[17] They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration.[18] According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States (1877-1950), Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male.[19] Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
+An Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South.
+On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.[20]
+By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some in-migration by whites.[21] With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a noted civil rights leader, was elected to the state House in 1965, and served multiple terms there and in the state senate.
+Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration to ensure the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, earned admiration by writing in support of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972 Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since Reconstruction.
+In 1980, construction was completed on an expansion of what is now named Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). The busiest and most efficient airport in the world, it accommodates more than a hundred million passengers annually.[22] Employing more than 60,000 people, the airport became a major engine for economic growth.[22] With the advantages of cheap real estate, low taxes, right-to-work laws and a regulatory environment limiting government interference, the Atlanta metropolitan area became a national center of finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, logistics, and transportation companies, as well as the film, convention, and trade show businesses. As a testament to the city's growing international profile, in 1990 the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of Atlanta's status as a transportation hub, in 1991 UPS established its headquarters in a suburb. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York or Chicago.
+Beginning from the Atlantic Ocean, the state's eastern border with South Carolina runs up the Savannah River, northwest to its origin at the confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers. It then continues up the Tugaloo (originally Tugalo) and into the Chattooga River, its most significant tributary. These bounds were decided in the 1797 Treaty of Beaufort, and tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in the two Georgia v. South Carolina cases in 1923 and 1989.[citation needed]
+The border then takes a sharp turn around the tip of Rabun County, at latitude 35°N, though from this point it diverges slightly south (due to inaccuracies in the original survey). This northern border was originally the Georgia and North Carolina border all the way to the Mississippi River, until Tennessee was divided from North Carolina, and the Yazoo companies induced the legislature of Georgia to pass an act, approved by the governor in 1795, to sell the greater part of Georgia's territory presently comprising Alabama and Mississippi.[23]
+The state's western border runs in a straight line south-southeastward from a point southwest of Chattanooga, to meet the Chattahoochee River near West Point. It continues downriver to the point where it joins the Flint River (the confluence of the two forming Florida's Apalachicola River); the southern border goes almost due east and very slightly south, in a straight line to the St. Mary's River, which then forms the remainder of the boundary back to the ocean.[citation needed]
+The water boundaries are still set to be the original thalweg of the rivers. Since then, several have been inundated by lakes created by dams, including the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint point now under Lake Seminole.[citation needed]
+Georgia state legislators have claimed that in an 1818 survey the state's border with Tennessee was erroneously placed one mile (1.6 km) farther south than intended, and they still dispute it. Correction of this inaccuracy would allow Georgia access to water from the Tennessee River.[24]
+Each region has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the Ridge and Valley, which lies in the northwest corner of the state, includes limestone, sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, which have yielded construction-grade limestone, barite, ocher, and small amounts of coal.
+The state of Georgia has approximately 250 tree species and 58 protected plants. Georgia's native trees include red cedar, a variety of pines, oaks, hollies, cypress, sweetgum, scaly-bark and white hickories, and sabal palmetto. East Georgia is in the subtropical coniferous forest biome and conifer species as other broadleaf evergreen flora make up the majority of the southern and coastal regions. Yellow jasmine and mountain laurel make up just a few of the flowering shrubs in the state.
+White-tailed (Virginia) deer are in nearly all counties. The northern mockingbird and brown thrasher are among the 160 bird species that live in the state.[25]
+Reptiles include the eastern diamondback, copperhead, and cottonmouth snakes as well as alligators; amphibians include salamanders, frogs and toads. There are about 79 species of reptile and 63 amphibians known to live in Georgia.[25]
+The most popular freshwater game fish are trout, bream, bass, and catfish, all but the last of which are produced in state hatcheries for restocking. Popular saltwater game fish include red drum, spotted seatrout, flounder, and tarpon. Porpoises, whales, shrimp, oysters, and blue crabs are found inshore and offshore of the Georgia coast.[25]
+The majority of the state is primarily a humid subtropical climate. Hot and humid summers are typical, except at the highest elevations. The entire state, including the North Georgia mountains, receives moderate to heavy precipitation, which varies from 45 inches (1143 mm) in central Georgia[26] to approximately 75 inches (1905 mm) around the northeast part of the state.[27] The degree to which the weather of a certain region of Georgia is subtropical depends on the latitude, its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, and the elevation. The latter factor is felt chiefly in the mountainous areas of the northern part of the state, which are farther away from the ocean and can be 4500 feet (1350 m) above sea level. The USDA plant hardiness zones for Georgia range from zone 6b (no colder than −5 °F (−21 °C) ) in the Blue Ridge Mountains to zone 8b (no colder than 15 °F (−9 °C) ) along the Atlantic coast and Florida border.[28]
+The highest temperature ever recorded is 112 °F (44.4 °C) in Louisville on July 24, 1952,[29] while the lowest is −17 °F (−27.2 °C) in northern Floyd County on January 27, 1940.[30] Georgia is one of the leading states in frequency of tornadoes, though they are rarely stronger than EF1. Although tornadoes striking the city are very rare,[31] an EF2 tornado[31] hit downtown Atlanta on March 14, 2008, causing moderate to severe damage to various buildings. With a coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, Georgia is also vulnerable to hurricanes, although direct hurricane strikes were rare during the 20th century. Georgia often is affected by hurricanes that strike the Florida Panhandle, weaken over land, and bring strong tropical storm winds and heavy rain to the interior, a recent example being Hurricane Michael,[32] as well as hurricanes that come close to the Georgia coastline, brushing the coast on their way north without ever making landfall. Hurricane Matthew of 2016 and Hurricane Dorian of 2019 did just that.
+The United States Census Bureau estimates that in 2019 Georgia had a population of 10,617,423, which was an increase of 97,948 from the previous year, and an increase of 929,770 (9.60%) since 2010.[35] This includes a natural increase since the last census of 438,939 (849,414 births minus 410,475 deaths) and an increase from net migration of 606,673 people into the state. Immigration resulted in a net increase of 228,415 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 378,258 people.
+As of 2010[update], the number of illegal immigrants living in Georgia more than doubled to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009, according to a federal report. That gave Georgia the greatest percentage increase among the 10 states with the biggest illegal immigrant populations during those years.[36] Georgia has banned sanctuary cities.[37]
+There were 743,000 veterans in 2009.[38]
+According to the 2010 United States Census, Georgia had a population of 9,687,653. In terms of race and ethnicity, the state was 59.7% White (55.9% Non-Hispanic White alone), 30.5% Black or African American, 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.2% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 4.0% from some other race, and 2.1% from two or more races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up 8.8% of the population.[39]
+As of 2011[update], 58.8% of Georgia's population younger than age 1 were minorities (meaning they had at least one parent who was not non-Hispanic white) compared to other states like California with 75.1%, New York with 55.6%, and Texas with 69.8%.[43]
+The largest European ancestry groups are:
+In the 1980 census 1,584,303 Georgians claimed English ancestry out of a total state population of 3,994,817, making them 40% of the state, and the largest ethnic group at the time.[46] Today, many of these same people claiming they are of "American" ancestry are actually of English descent, and some are of Scots-Irish descent; however, their families have lived in the state for so long, in many cases since the colonial period, that they choose to identify simply as having "American" ancestry or do not in fact know their own ancestry. Their ancestry primarily goes back to the original thirteen colonies and for this reason many of them today simply claim "American" ancestry, though they are of predominantly English ancestry.[47][48][49][50]
+As of 2004[update], 7.7% of Georgia's population was reported as under 5 years of age, 26.4% under 18, and 9.6% were 65 or older. Also, as of 2004[update], females made up approximately 50.6% of the population and African Americans made up approximately 29.6%.
+Historically, about half of Georgia's population was composed of African Americans who, before the Civil War, were almost exclusively enslaved. The Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North from 1914 to 1970 reduced the African American population.[51]
+Georgia had the second-fastest-growing Asian population growth in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000, more than doubling in size during the ten-year period.[52] In addition, according to census estimates, Georgia ranks third among the states in terms of the percent of the total population that is African American (after Mississippi and Louisiana) and third in numeric Black population after New York and Florida.
+Georgia is the state with the third-lowest percentage of older people (65 or older), at 12.8 percent (as of 2015[update]).[53]
+The colonial settlement of large numbers of Scottish American, English American and Scotch-Irish Americans in the mountains and piedmont, and coastal settlement by some English Americans and African Americans, have strongly influenced the state's culture in food, language and music. The concentration of Africans imported to coastal areas in the 18th century repeatedly from rice-growing regions of West Africa led to the development of Gullah-Geechee language and culture in the Low Country among African Americans. They share a unique heritage in which African traditions of food, religion and culture were continued more than in some other areas. In the creolization of Southern culture, their foodways became an integral part of all Southern cooking in the Low Country.[54][55]
+As of 2010[update], 87.35% (7,666,663) of Georgia residents age 5 and older spoke English at home as a primary language, while 7.42% (651,583) spoke Spanish, 0.51% (44,702) Korean, 0.44% (38,244) Vietnamese, 0.42% (36,679) French, 0.38% (33,009) Chinese (which includes Mandarin), and German, which was spoken as a main language by 0.29% (23,351) of the population over the age of  5. In total, 12.65% (1,109,888) of Georgia's population age 5 and older spoke a mother language other than English.[56]
+Atlanta, located in north-central Georgia at the Eastern Continental Divide, has been Georgia's capital city since 1868. It is the most populous city in Georgia, with an estimated 2019 population of just over 506,000.[57]
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the cultural and economic center of the Southeast; its estimated population in 2019 was over 6 million, or 57% of Georgia's total. Atlanta is the nation's ninth largest metropolitan area.[58]
+The state has seventeen cities with populations above 50,000, based on 2019 U.S. Census estimates.[57]
+* In 2014, the City of Macon and most of unincorporated Bibb County officially merged. Macon joined Columbus, Augusta, Athens, Cusseta and Georgetown as consolidated city-county governments in Georgia.
+Along with the rest of the Southeast, Georgia's population continues to grow rapidly, with primary gains concentrated in urban areas. The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area added 1.23 million people (24 percent) between 2000 and 2010, and Atlanta rose in rank from the eleventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States to the ninth-largest.[59]
+The composition of religious affiliation in Georgia is 70% Protestant, 9% Catholic, 1% Mormon, 1% Jewish, 0.5% Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, and 0.5% Hindu. Atheists, deists, agnostics, and other unaffiliated people make up 13% of the population.[60] The largest Christian denominations by number of adherents in 2010 were the Southern Baptist Convention with 1,759,317; the United Methodist Church with 619,394; and the Roman Catholic Church with 596,384. Non-denominational Evangelical Protestant had 566,782 members, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) has 175,184 members, and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. has 172,982 members.[61] The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the largest Presbyterian body in the state, with 300 congregations and 100,000 members. The other large body, Presbyterian Church in America, had at its founding date 14 congregations and 2,800 members; in 2010 it counted 139 congregations and 32,000 members.[62][63] The Roman Catholic Church is noteworthy in Georgia's urban areas, and includes the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah. Georgia is home to the largest Hindu temple in the United States, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, located in the suburb city of Lilburn. Georgia is home to several historic synagogues including The Temple (Atlanta), Congregation Beth Jacob (Atlanta), and Congregation Mickve Israel (Savannah). Chabad and the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute are also active in the state.[64][65]
+As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Georgia's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power.[67] Executive authority in the state rests with the governor, currently Brian Kemp (Republican). Both the Governor of Georgia and lieutenant governor are elected on separate ballots to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the executive officials who comprise the governor's cabinet are elected by the citizens of Georgia rather than appointed by the governor.
+Legislative authority resides in the General Assembly, composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate, while members of the House of Representatives select their own Speaker. The Georgia Constitution mandates a maximum of 56 senators, elected from single-member districts, and a minimum of 180 representatives, apportioned among representative districts (which sometimes results in more than one representative per district); there are currently 56 senators and 180 representatives. The term of office for senators and representatives is two years.[68] The laws enacted by the General Assembly are codified in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.
+State judicial authority rests with the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, which have statewide authority.[69] In addition, there are smaller courts which have more limited geographical jurisdiction, including Superior Courts, State Courts, Juvenile Courts, Magistrate Courts and Probate Courts. Justices of the Supreme Court and judges of the Court of Appeals are elected statewide by the citizens in non-partisan elections to six-year terms. Judges for the smaller courts are elected to four-year terms by the state's citizens who live within that court's jurisdiction.
+Georgia consists of 159 counties, second only to Texas, with 254.[70] Georgia had 161 counties until the end of 1931, when Milton and Campbell were merged into the existing Fulton. Some counties have been named for prominent figures in both American and Georgian history, and many bear names with Native American origin. Counties in Georgia have their own elected legislative branch, usually called the Board of Commissioners, which usually also has executive authority in the county.[71] Several counties have a sole Commissioner form of government, with legislative and executive authority vested in a single person. Georgia is the only state with current Sole Commissioner counties. Georgia's Constitution provides all counties and cities with "home rule" authority. The county commissions have considerable power to pass legislation within their county, as a municipality would.
+Georgia recognizes all local units of government as cities, so every incorporated town is legally a city. Georgia does not provide for townships or independent cities, though there have been bills proposed in the Legislature to provide for townships;[72] it does allow consolidated city-county governments by local referendum. All of Georgia's second-tier cities except Savannah have now formed consolidated city-county governments by referendum: Columbus (in 1970), Athens (1990), Augusta (1995), and Macon (2012). (Augusta and Athens have excluded one or more small, incorporated towns within their consolidated boundaries; Columbus and Macon eventually absorbed all smaller incorporated entities within their consolidated boundaries.) The small town of Cusseta adopted a consolidated city-county government after it merged with unincorporated Chattahoochee County in 2003. Three years later, in 2006, the town of Georgetown consolidated with the rest of Quitman County.
+There is no true metropolitan government in Georgia, though the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and Georgia Regional Transportation Authority do provide some services, and the ARC must approve all major land development projects in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
+Georgia has voted Republican in six consecutive presidential elections since 1996.
+Until 1964, Georgia's state government had the longest unbroken record of single-party dominance, by the Democratic Party, of any state in the Union. This record was established largely due to the disenfranchisement of most blacks and many poor whites by the state in its constitution and laws in the early 20th century. Some elements, such as requiring payment of poll taxes and passing literacy tests, prevented blacks from registering to vote; their exclusion from the political system lasted into the 1960s and reduced the Republican Party to a non-competitive status in the early 20th century.[73]
+White Democrats regained power after Reconstruction due in part to the efforts of some using intimidation and violence, but this method came into disrepute.[74] In 1900, shortly before Georgia adopted a disfranchising constitutional amendment in 1908, blacks comprised 47% of the state's population.[75]
+The whites dealt with this problem of potential political power by the 1908 amendment, which in practice disenfranchised blacks and poor whites, nearly half of the state population. It required that any male at least 21 years of age wanting to register to vote must also: (a) be of good character and able to pass a test on citizenship, (b) be able to read and write provisions of the U.S. and Georgia constitutions, or (c) own at least 40 acres of land or $500 in property. Any Georgian who had fought in any war from the American Revolution through the Spanish–American War was exempted from these additional qualifications. More importantly, any Georgian descended from a veteran of any of these wars also was exempted. Because by 1908 many white Georgia males were grandsons of veterans and/or owned the required property, the exemption and the property requirement basically allowed only well-to-do whites to vote. The qualifications of good character, citizenship knowledge, and literacy (all determined subjectively by white registrars), and property ownership were used to disqualify most blacks and poor whites, preventing them from registering to vote. The voter rolls dropped dramatically.[74][76] In the early 20th century, Progressives promoted electoral reform and reducing the power of ward bosses to clean up politics. Their additional rules, such as the eight-box law, continued to effectively close out people who were illiterate.[17] White, one-party rule was solidified.
+For more than 130 years, from 1872 to 2003, Georgians nominated and elected only white Democratic governors, and white Democrats held the majority of seats in the General Assembly.[77] Most of the Democrats elected throughout these years were Southern Democrats, who were fiscally and socially conservative by national standards.[78][79] This voting pattern continued after the segregationist period.[80]
+Legal segregation was ended by passage of federal legislation in the 1960s. According to the 1960 census, the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American was 28%; hundreds of thousands of blacks had left the state in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. New white residents arrived through migration and immigration. Following support from the national Democratic Party for the civil rights movement and especially civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, most African-American voters, as well as other minority voters, have largely supported the Democratic Party in Georgia.[81] In the decades since the late 20th century, the conservative white-majority voters have increasingly supported Republicans for national and state offices.
+In 2002, incumbent moderate Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was defeated by Republican Sonny Perdue, a state legislator and former Democrat. While Democrats retained control of the State House, they lost their majority in the Senate when four Democrats switched parties. They lost the House in the 2004 election. Republicans then controlled all three partisan elements of the state government.
+Even before 2002, the state had become increasingly supportive of Republicans in Presidential elections. It has supported a Democrat for president only three times since 1960. In 1976 and 1980, native son Jimmy Carter carried the state; in 1992, the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton narrowly won the state. Generally, Republicans are strongest in the predominantly white suburban (especially the Atlanta suburbs) and rural portions of the state.[82] Many of these areas were represented by conservative Democrats in the state legislature well into the 21st century. One of the most conservative of these was U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald, former head of the John Birch Society, who died when the Soviet Union shot down KAL 007 near Sakhalin Island. Democratic candidates have tended to win a higher percentage of the vote in the areas where black voters are most numerous,[82] as well as in the cities among liberal urban populations (especially Atlanta and Athens), and the central and southwestern portion of the state.
+The ascendancy of the Republican Party in Georgia and in the South in general resulted in Georgia U.S. House of Representatives member Newt Gingrich being elected as Speaker of the House following the election of a Republican majority in the House in 1994. Gingrich served as Speaker until 1999, when he resigned in the aftermath of the loss of House seats held by members of the GOP. Gingrich mounted an unsuccessful bid for president in the 2012 election, but withdrew after winning only the South Carolina and Georgia primaries.
+In 2008, Democrat Jim Martin ran against incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss failed to acquire the necessary 50 percent of votes due to a Libertarian Party candidate receiving the remainder of votes. In the runoff election held on December 2, 2008, Chambliss became the second Georgia Republican to be reelected to the U.S. Senate.
+In the 2018 elections, the governor remained a Republican (by 54,723 votes against a democratic black female, Stacey Abrams), Republicans lost eight seats in the Georgia House of Representatives (winning 106), while Democrats gained ten (winning 74), Republicans lost two seats in the Georgia Senate (winning 35 seats), while Democrats gained two seats (winning 21), and five Democrat U.S. Representatives were elected with Republicans winning nine seats (one winning with just 419 votes over the Democratic challenger, and one seat being lost).[83][84][85]
+In the last three presidential elections as of 2018, the Republican candidate has won Georgia by approximately five to eight points over the Democratic nominee, at least once for each election being narrower than margins recorded in some states that have flipped within that timeframe, such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Therefore, it could potentially be regarded as a swing state in future elections should voter preferences only shift slightly.
+During the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia made significant changes in civil rights and governance. As in many other states, its legislature had not reapportioned congressional districts according to population from 1931 to after the 1960 census. Problems of malapportionment in the state legislature, where rural districts had outsize power in relation to urban districts, such as Atlanta's, were corrected after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). The court ruled that congressional districts had to be reapportioned to have essentially equal populations.
+A related case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), required state legislatures to end their use of geographical districts or counties in favor of "one man, one vote"; that is, districts based upon approximately equal populations, to be reviewed and changed as necessary after each census. These changes resulted in residents of Atlanta and other urban areas gaining political power in Georgia in proportion to their populations.[86] From the mid-1960s, the voting electorate increased after African Americans' rights to vote were enforced under civil rights law.
+Economic growth through this period was dominated by Atlanta and its region. It was a bedrock of the emerging "New South". From the late 20th century, Atlanta attracted headquarters and relocated workers of national companies, becoming more diverse, liberal and cosmopolitan than many areas of the state.
+In the 21st century, many conservative Democrats, including former U.S. Senator and governor Zell Miller, decided to support Republicans. The state's socially conservative bent results in wide support for such measures as restrictions on abortion. In 2004, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages was approved by 76% of voters.[87] However, after the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, all Georgia counties came into full compliance, recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state.[88]
+Georgia's 2018 total gross state product was $602 billion.[89] For years Georgia as a state has had the highest credit rating by Standard & Poor's (AAA) and is one of only 15 states with a AAA rating.[90] If Georgia were a stand-alone country, it would be the 28th largest economy in the world, based on data from 2005.[91]
+There are 17 Fortune 500 companies and 26 Fortune 1000 companies with headquarters in Georgia, including Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, TSYS, Delta Air Lines, Aflac, Southern Company, Anthem Inc., and SunTrust Banks.
+Atlanta boasts the world's busiest airport, as measured both by passenger traffic and by aircraft traffic.[93][94] Also, the Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport and fastest-growing container seaport in North America, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95]
+Atlanta has a large effect on the state of Georgia, the Southeastern United States, and beyond. Atlanta has been the site of growth in finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, service, logistics, transportation, film, communications, convention and trade show businesses and industries, while tourism is important to the economy. Atlanta is a global city, also called world city or sometimes alpha city or world center, as a city generally considered to be an important node in the global economic system.
+For the five years through November 2017, Georgia has been ranked the top state (number 1) in the nation to do business, and has been recognized as number 1 for business and labor climate in the nation, number 1 in business climate in the nation, number 1 in the nation in workforce training and as having a "Best in Class" state economic development agency.[96][97]
+In 2016, Georgia had median annual income per person of between $50,000 and $59,999, which is in inflation-adjusted dollars for 2016. The U.S. median annual income for the entire nation is $57,617. This lies within the range of Georgia's median annual income.[98]
+Widespread farms produce peanuts, corn, and soybeans across middle and south Georgia. The state is the number one producer of pecans in the world, with the region around Albany in southwest Georgia being the center of Georgia's pecan production. Gainesville in northeast Georgia touts itself as the Poultry Capital of the World. Georgia is in the top five blueberry producers in the United States.[99]
+Major products in the mineral industry include a variety of clays, stones, sands and the clay palygorskite, known as attapulgite.
+While many textile jobs moved overseas, there is still a textile industry located around the cities of Rome, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and along the I-75 corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Historically it started along the fall line in the Piedmont, where factories were powered by waterfalls and rivers. It includes the towns of Cartersville, Calhoun, Ringgold and Dalton[100]
+In November 2009, Kia started production in Georgia at the first U.S. Kia Motors plant, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia in West Point.
+Industrial products include textiles and apparel, transportation equipment, food processing, paper products, chemicals and products, and electric equipment.
+Georgia was ranked the number 2 state for infrastructure and global access by Area Development magazine.[101]
+The Georgia Ports Authority owns and operates four ports in the state: Port of Savannah, Port of Brunswick, Port Bainbridge, and Port Columbus. The Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport in the United States, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95] The Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal is the largest single container terminal in North America.[102] Several major companies including Target, IKEA, and Heineken operate distribution centers in close proximity to the Port of Savannah.
+Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport moves over 650,000 tons of cargo annually through three cargo complexes (two million square feet of floor space). It has nearby cold storage for perishables; it is the only airport in the Southeast with USDA-approved cold-treatment capabilities. Delta Air Lines also offers an on-airport refrigeration facility for perishable cargo, and a 250-acre Foreign Trade Zone is located at the airport.[103]
+Georgia is a major railway hub, has the most extensive rail system in the Southeast, and has the service of two Class I railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, plus 24 short-line railroads. Georgia is ranked the #3 state in the nation for rail accessibility. Rail shipments include intermodal, bulk, automotive and every other type of shipment.[104]
+Georgia has an extensive interstate highway system including 1,200 miles of interstate highway and 20,000 miles of federal and state highways that facilitate the efficient movement of more than $620 billion of cargo by truck each year. Georgia's six interstates connect to 80 percent of the U.S. population within a two-day truck drive. More than $14 billion in funding has been approved[when?] for new roadway infrastructure.[105]
+Southern Congressmen have attracted major investment by the U.S. military in the state. The several installations include Moody Air Force Base, Fort Stewart, Hunter Army Airfield, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Fort Benning, Robins Air Force Base, Fort Gordon, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Coast Guard Air Station Savannah and Coast Guard Station Brunswick. These installations command numerous jobs and business for related contractors.
+Georgia's electricity generation and consumption are among the highest in the United States, with natural gas being the primary electrical generation fuel, followed by coal. The state also has two nuclear power facilities, Plant Hatch and Plant Vogtle, which contribute almost one fourth of Georgia's electricity generation, and an additional two nuclear power plants are under construction[when?] at Plant Vogtle. In 2013, the generation mix was 39% gas, 35% coal, 23% nuclear, 3% hydro and other renewable sources. The leading area of energy consumption is the industrial sector because Georgia "is a leader in the energy-intensive wood and paper products industry".[106] Solar generated energy is becoming more in use with solar energy generators currently installed ranking Georgia 15th in the country in installed solar capacity. In 2013, $189 million was invested in Georgia to install solar for home, business and utility use representing a 795% increase over the previous year.[107]
+Georgia has a progressive income tax structure with six brackets of state income tax rates that range from 1% to 6%. In 2009, Georgians paid 9% of their income in state and local taxes, compared to the U.S. average of 9.8% of income.[108] This ranks Georgia 25th among the states for total state and local tax burden.[108] The state sales tax in Georgia is 4%[109] with additional percentages added through local options (e.g. special-purpose local-option sales tax or SPLOST), but there is no sales tax on prescription drugs, certain medical devices, or food items for home consumption.[110]
+The state legislature may allow municipalities to institute local sales taxes and special local taxes, such as the 2% SPLOST tax and the 1% sales tax for MARTA serviced counties. Excise taxes are levied on alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel. Owners of real property in Georgia pay property tax to their county. All taxes are collected by the Georgia Department of Revenue and then properly distributed according to any agreements that each county has with its cities.
+The Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office promotes filming in the state.[111] Since 1972, seven hundred film and television projects have been filmed on location in Georgia.[112] Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state location with the most feature films produced. In FY2017, film and television production in Georgia had an economic impact of $9.5 billion.[113] Atlanta now is even called the "Hollywood of the South".[114] Television shows like Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are filmed in the state.[115] Movies too, such as Passengers, Forrest Gump, Contagion, Hidden Figures, Sully, Baby Driver, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Birds of Prey and many more, were filmed around Georgia.[116][117]
+In the Atlanta area, World of Coke, Georgia Aquarium, Zoo Atlanta and Stone Mountain are important tourist attractions.[118][119] Stone Mountain is Georgia's "most popular attraction"; receiving more than four million tourists per year.[120][121] The Georgia Aquarium, in Atlanta, was the largest aquarium in the world in 2010 according to Guinness World Records.[122]
+Callaway Gardens, in western Georgia, is a family resort.[123] The area is also popular with golfers.
+The Savannah Historic District attracts more than eleven million tourists each year.[124]
+The Golden Isles is a string of barrier islands off the Atlantic coast of Georgia near Brunswick that includes beaches, golf courses and the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
+Several sites honor the lives and careers of noted American leaders: the Little White House in Warm Springs, which served as the summer residence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he was being treated for polio; President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains and the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta; the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta, which is the final resting place of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King; and Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King preached.
+Georgia's major fine art museums include the High Museum of Art and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, both in Atlanta; the Georgia Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens; Telfair Museum of Art and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah; and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta.[125]
+The state theatre of Georgia is the Springer Opera House located in Columbus.
+The Atlanta Opera brings opera to Georgia stages.[126] The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the most widely recognized orchestra and largest arts organization in the southeastern United States.[127]
+There are a number of performing arts venues in the state, among the largest are the Fox Theatre, and the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, both on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta as well as the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, located in Northwest Atlanta.
+Authors have grappled with Georgia's complex history. Popular novels related to this include Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
+A number of noted authors, poets and playwrights have lived in Georgia, such as James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, Sidney Lanier, Frank Yerby and Lewis Grizzard.[128]
+Well-known television shows set in Atlanta include, from Tyler Perry Studios, House of Payne and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the CBS sitcom Designing Women, Matlock, the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva, Rectify and numerous HGTV original productions.
+The Dukes of Hazzard, a 1980s TV show, was set in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia. The first five episodes were shot on location in Conyers and Covington, Georgia as well as some locations in Atlanta. Production was then moved to Burbank, California.[citation needed]
+Also filmed in Georgia is The Vampire Diaries, using Covington as the setting for the fictional Mystic Falls.
+A number of notable musicians in various genres of popular music are from Georgia. Among them are Ray Charles (whose many hits include "Georgia on My Mind", now the official state song), and Gladys Knight (known for her Georgia-themed song, "Midnight Train to Georgia").
+Rock groups from Georgia include the Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Black Crowes, and The Allman Brothers.
+The university city of Athens sparked an influential rock music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Among the groups achieving their initial prominence there were R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and the B-52's.
+Since the 1990s, various hip-hop and R&B musicians have included top-selling artists such as Outkast, Usher, Ludacris, TLC, B.o.B., and Ciara. Atlanta is mentioned in a number of these artists' tracks, such as Usher's "A-Town Down" reference in his 2004 hit "Yeah!" (which also features Atlanta artists Lil Jon and Ludacris), Ludacris' "Welcome to Atlanta", Outkast's album "ATLiens", and B.o.B.'s multiple references to Decatur, Georgia, as in his hit song "Strange Clouds".
+Two movies, both set in Atlanta, won Oscars for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Other films set in Georgia include Deliverance (1972), Parental Guidance (2012), and Vacation.
+Sports in Georgia include professional teams in nearly all major sports, Olympic Games contenders and medalists, collegiate teams in major and small-school conferences and associations, and active amateur teams and individual sports. The state of Georgia has teams in four major professional leagues—the Atlanta Braves of Major League Baseball, the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League, the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association, and Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer.
+The Georgia Bulldogs (Southeastern Conference), Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Atlantic Coast Conference), Georgia State Panthers and Georgia Southern Eagles (Sun Belt Conference) are Georgia's NCAA Division I FBS football teams, having won multiple national championships between them. The Georgia Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets have a historical rivalry in college football known as Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, and the Georgia State Panthers and the Georgia Southern Eagles have recently developed their own rivalry.
+The 1996 Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta. The stadium that was built to host various Olympic events was converted to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves through 2016.
+The Masters golf tournament, the first of the PGA tour's four "majors", is held annually the second weekend of April at the Augusta National Golf Club.
+The Atlanta Motor Speedway hosts the Dixie 500 NASCAR Cup Series stock car race and Road Atlanta the Petit Le Mans endurance sports car race.
+Atlanta's Georgia Dome hosted Super Bowl XXVIII in 1994 and Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. The Georgia Dome hosted the NCAA Final Four Men's Basketball National Championship in 2002, 2007, and 2013.[129]
+It hosted WWE's WrestleMania XXVII in 2011, an event which set an attendance record of 71,617. The dome was also the venue of the annual Chick-fil-A Bowl post-season college football games. Since 2017, they have been held at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium along with the FIRST World Championships.
+Professional baseball's Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was from Narrows and was nicknamed the "Georgia Peach".[130]
+There are 48 state parks, 15 historic sites, and numerous wildlife preserves under supervision of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.[131] Other historic sites and parks are supervised by the National Park Service and include the Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville; Appalachian National Scenic Trail; Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area near Atlanta; Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park at Fort Oglethorpe; Cumberland Island National Seashore near St. Marys; Fort Frederica National Monument on St. Simons Island; Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah; Jimmy Carter National Historic Site near Plains; Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park near Kennesaw; Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta; Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon; Trail of Tears National Historic Trail; and the Okefenokee Swamp in Waycross, Georgia[132]
+Outdoor recreational activities include hiking along the Appalachian Trail; Civil War Heritage Trails; rock climbing and whitewater kayaking.[133][134][135][136] Other outdoor activities include hunting and fishing.
+Georgia county and city public school systems are administered by school boards with members elected at the local level. As of 2013[update], all but 19 of 181 boards are elected from single-member districts. Residents and activist groups in Fayette County, Georgia sued the board of commissioners and school board for maintaining an election system based on at-large voting, which tended to increase the power of the majority and effectively prevented minority participation on elected local boards for nearly 200 years.[137] A change to single-member districts has resulted in the African-American minority being able to elect representatives of its choice.
+Georgia high schools (grades nine through twelve) are required to administer a standardized, multiple choice End of Course Test, or EOCT, in each of eight core subjects: algebra, geometry, U.S. history, economics, biology, physical science, ninth grade literature and composition, and American literature. The official purpose of the tests is to assess "specific content knowledge and skills". Although a minimum test score is not required for the student to receive credit in the course, completion of the test is mandatory. The EOCT score accounts for 15% of a student's grade in the course.[138] The Georgia Milestone evaluation is taken by public school students in the state.[139]
+Georgia has 85 public colleges, universities, and technical colleges in addition to more than 45 private institutes of higher learning. Among Georgia's public universities is the flagship research university, the University of Georgia, founded in 1785 as the country's oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education.[140] The University System of Georgia is the presiding body over public post-secondary education in the state. The System includes 29 institutions of higher learning and is governed by the Georgia Board of Regents. Georgia's workforce of more than 6.3 million is constantly refreshed by the growing number of people who move there along with the 90,000 graduates from the universities, colleges and technical colleges across the state, including the highly ranked University of Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University and Emory University.[141]
+The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, is available to all Georgia residents who have graduated from high school or earned a General Educational Development certificate. The student must maintain a 3.2 or higher grade point average and attend a public college or university in the state.
+The Georgia Historical Society, an independent educational and research institution, has a research center located in Savannah. The research center's library and archives hold the oldest collection of materials related to Georgia history in the nation.
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the ninth largest media market in the United States as ranked by Nielsen Media Research. The state's other top markets are Savannah (95th largest), Augusta (115th largest), and Columbus (127th largest).[142]
+There are 48 television broadcast stations in Georgia including TBS, TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, CNN and Headline News, all founded by notable Georgia resident Ted Turner. The Weather Channel also has its headquarters in Atlanta.
+By far, the largest daily newspaper in Georgia is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a daily readership of 195,592 and a Sunday readership of 397,925.[143][144] Other large dailies include The Augusta Chronicle, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, The Telegraph (formerly The Macon Telegraph) and the Savannah Morning News.
+WSB-AM in Atlanta was the first licensed radio station in the southeastern United States, signing on in 1922. Georgia Public Radio has been in service since 1984[145][146] and, with the exception of Atlanta, it broadcasts daily on several FM (and one AM) stations across the state. Georgia Public Radio reaches nearly all of Georgia (with the exception of the Atlanta area, which is served by WABE).
+WSB-TV in Atlanta is the state's oldest television station, having begun operations in 1948. WSB was only the second such operation founded in the Southern U.S., trailing only WTVR in Richmond, Virginia.[citation needed]
+Transportation in Georgia is overseen by the Georgia Department of Transportation, a part of the executive branch of the state government. Georgia's major Interstate Highways are I-20, I-75, I-85, and I-95. On March 18, 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution naming the portion of Interstate Highway 75, which runs from the Chattahoochee River northward to the Tennessee state line the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway. Larry McDonald, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, had been on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983.
+Georgia's primary commercial airport is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), the world's busiest airport.[147] In addition to Hartsfield–Jackson, there are eight other airports serving major commercial traffic in Georgia. Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport is the second-busiest airport in the state as measured by passengers served, and is the only additional international airport. Other commercial airports (ranked in order of passengers served) are located in Augusta, Columbus, Albany, Macon, Brunswick, Valdosta, and Athens.[148]
+The Georgia Ports Authority manages two deepwater seaports, at Savannah and Brunswick, and two river ports, at Bainbridge and Columbus. The Port of Savannah is a major U.S. seaport on the Atlantic coast.
+The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the principal rapid transit system in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Formed in 1971 as strictly a bus system, MARTA operates a network of bus routes linked to a rapid transit system consisting of 48 miles (77 km) of rail track with 38 train stations. MARTA operates almost exclusively in Fulton and DeKalb counties, with bus service to two destinations in Cobb county and the Cumberland Transfer Center next to the Cumberland Mall, and a single rail station in Clayton County at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. MARTA also operates a separate paratransit service for disabled customers. As of 2009[update], the average total daily ridership for the system (bus and rail) was 482,500 passengers.[149]
+The state has 151 general hospitals, more than 15,000 doctors and almost 6,000 dentists.[150] The state is ranked forty-first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise.[151]
+Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Georgia, was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929. He was a civil rights movement leader fighting for rights for African Americans and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.[152] Mordecai Sheftall, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the American Revolution, was born and lived his life in Georgia.[153]
+Reference: Georgia Symbols[154]
+Coordinates: 33°00′N 83°30′W / 33°N 83.5°W / 33; -83.5

en/2193.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,268 @@

+Coordinates: 42°00′N 43°30′E / 42.000°N 43.500°E / 42.000; 43.500
+Georgia (Georgian: საქართველო, translit.: sakartvelo) is a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the south by Turkey and Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi. Georgia covers a territory of 69,700 square kilometres (26,911 sq mi), and its approximate population is about 3.718 million. Georgia is a unitary parliamentary republic, with the government elected through a representative democracy.
+During the classical era, several independent kingdoms became established in what is now Georgia, such as Colchis and Iberia. The Georgians officially adopted Christianity in the early 4th century. The Georgian Orthodox Church had enormous importance for the spiritual and political unification of early Georgian states. The unified Kingdom of Georgia reached its Golden Age during the reign of King David the Builder and Queen Tamar the Great in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Thereafter, the kingdom declined and eventually disintegrated under the hegemony of various regional powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire and successive dynasties of Iran. In the late 18th century, the eastern Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti forged an alliance with the Russian Empire, which directly annexed the kingdom in 1801 and conquered the western Kingdom of Imereti in 1810. Russian rule over Georgia was eventually acknowledged in various peace treaties with Iran and the Ottomans and the remaining Georgian territories were absorbed by the Russian Empire in a piecemeal fashion through the course of the 19th century.
+During the Civil War following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Georgia briefly became part of the Transcaucasian Federation and then emerged as an independent republic before the Russian army invasion in 1921, which established a government of workers' and peasants' soviets. Soviet Georgia would be incorporated into a new Transcaucasian Federation that, in 1922, would be a founding republic of the Soviet Union. In 1936, the Transcaucasian Federation was dissolved and Georgia emerged as a Union Republic. During World War II, almost 700,000 Georgians fought in the Red Army against the Germans. After Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a native Georgian, died in 1953, a wave of protest spread against Nikita Khrushchev and his de-Stalinization reforms, leading to the death of nearly one hundred students in 1956.
+By the 1980s, an independence movement was established and grew, leading to Georgia's secession from the Soviet Union in April 1991. For most of the following decade, post-Soviet Georgia suffered from civil conflicts, secessionist wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and economic crisis. Following the bloodless Rose Revolution in 2003, Georgia strongly pursued a pro-Western foreign policy; aimed at NATO and European integration, it introduced a series of democratic and economic reforms. This brought about mixed results, but strengthened state institutions. The country's Western orientation soon led to the worsening of relations with Russia, culminating in the brief Russo-Georgian War in August 2008 and Georgia's current territorial dispute with Russia.
+Georgia is a developing country and ranks 70th on the Human Development Index. The country is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development. It contains two de facto independent regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which gained very limited international recognition after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Most of the world's countries consider the regions to be Georgian territory under Russian occupation.[10]
+"Georgia" probably stems from the Persian designation of the Georgians – gurğān, in the 11th and 12th centuries adapted via Syriac gurz-ān/gurz-iyān and Arabic ĵurĵan/ĵurzan. Lore-based theories were given by the traveller Jacques de Vitry, who explained the name's origin by the popularity of St. George amongst Georgians,[11] while traveller Jean Chardin thought that "Georgia" came from Greek γεωργός ("tiller of the land"). As Prof. Alexander Mikaberidze adds, these century-old explanations for the word Georgia/Georgians are rejected by the scholarly community, who point to the Persian word gurğ/gurğān ("wolf"[12]) as the root of the word.[13] Starting with the Persian word gurğ/gurğān, the word was later adopted in numerous other languages, including Slavic and West European languages.[13][14] This term itself might have been established through the ancient Iranian appellation of the near-Caspian region, which was referred to as Gorgan ("land of the wolves").[13][15]
+The native name is Sakartvelo (საქართველო; "land of Kartvelians"), derived from the core central Georgian region of Kartli, recorded from the 9th century, and in extended usage referring to the entire medieval Kingdom of Georgia by the 13th century. The self-designation used by ethnic Georgians is Kartvelebi (ქართველები, i.e. "Kartvelians").
+The medieval Georgian Chronicles present an eponymous ancestor of the Kartvelians, Kartlos, a great-grandson of Japheth. However, scholars agree that the word is derived from the Karts, the latter being one of the proto-Georgian tribes that emerged as a dominant group in ancient times.[13] The name Sakartvelo (საქართველო) consists of two parts. Its root, kartvel-i (ქართველ-ი), specifies an inhabitant of the core central-eastern Georgian region of Kartli, or Iberia as it is known in sources of the Eastern Roman Empire.[16] Ancient Greeks (Strabo, Herodotus, Plutarch, Homer, etc.) and Romans (Titus Livius, Tacitus, etc.) referred to early western Georgians as Colchians and eastern Georgians as Iberians (Iberoi in some Greek sources).[17] The Georgian circumfix sa-X-o is a standard geographic construction designating "the area where X dwell", where X is an ethnonym.[18]
+Today the full, official name of the country is "Georgia", as specified in the official English version of the Georgian constitution which reads "Georgia shall be the name of the State of Georgia."[19] Before the 1995 constitution came into force the country's name was the Republic of Georgia.[b]
+The territory of modern-day Georgia was inhabited by Homo erectus since the Paleolithic Era. The proto-Georgian tribes first appear in written history in the 12th century BC.[20] The earliest evidence of wine to date has been found in Georgia, where 8000-year old wine jars were uncovered.[21][22] Archaeological finds and references in ancient sources also reveal elements of early political and state formations characterized by advanced metallurgy and goldsmith techniques that date back to the 7th century BC and beyond.[20] In fact, early metallurgy started in Georgia during the 6th millennium BC, associated with the Shulaveri-Shomu culture.[23]
+The classical period saw the rise of a number of early Georgian states, the principal of which were Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east. In Greek mythology, Colchis was the location of the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts in Apollonius Rhodius' epic tale Argonautica. The incorporation of the Golden Fleece into the myth may have derived from the local practice of using fleeces to sift gold dust from rivers.[24] In the 4th century BC, a kingdom of Iberia – an early example of advanced state organization under one king and an aristocratic hierarchy – was established.[25]
+After the Roman Republic completed its brief conquest of what is now Georgia in 66 BC, the area became a primary objective of what would eventually turn out to be over 700 years of protracted Irano–Roman geo-political rivalry and warfare.[26][27] From the first centuries A.D, the cult of Mithras, pagan beliefs, and Zoroastrianism were commonly practised in Georgia.[28] In 337 AD King Mirian III declared Christianity as the state religion, giving a great stimulus to the development of literature, arts, and ultimately playing a key role in the formation of the unified Georgian nation,[29][30] The acceptance led to the slow but sure decline of Zoroastrianism,[31] which until the 5th century AD, appeared to have become something like a second established religion in Iberia (eastern Georgia), and was widely practised there.[32]
+Located on the crossroads of protracted Roman–Persian wars, the early Georgian kingdoms disintegrated into various feudal regions by the early Middle Ages. This made it easy for the remaining Georgian realms to fall prey to the early Muslim conquests in the 7th century.
+The extinction of the different Iberian royal dynasties, such as Guaramids and the Chosroids,[33] and also the Abbasid preoccupation with their own civil wars and conflict with the Byzantine Empire, led to the Bagrationi family's growth in prominence. The head of the Bagrationi dynasty Ashot I of Iberia (r.813–826), who had migrated to the former southwestern territories of Iberia, came to rule over Tao-Klarjeti and restored the Principate of Iberia in 813. The sons and grandsons of Ashot I established three separate branches, frequently struggling with each other and with neighboring rulers. The Kartli line prevailed; in 888 Adarnase IV of Iberia (r.888–923) restored the indigenous royal authority dormant since 580. Despite the revitalization of the Iberian monarchy, remaining Georgian lands were divided among rival authorities, with Tbilisi remaining in Arab hands.
+An Arab incursion into western Georgia led by Marwan II, was repelled by Leon I (r.720–740) jointly with his Lazic and Iberian allies in 736. Leon I then married Mirian's daughter, and a successor, Leon II exploited this dynastic union to acquire Lazica in the 770s.[34] The successful defense against the Arabs, and new territorial gains, gave the Abkhazian princes enough power to claim more autonomy from the Byzantine Empire. Towards circa 778, Leon II (r.780–828) won his full independence with the help of the Khazars and was crowned as the king of Abkhazia. After obtaining independence for the state, the matter of church independence became the main problem. In the early 9th century the Abkhazian Church broke away from the Constantinople and recognized the authority of the Catholicate of Mtskheta; Georgian language replaced Greek as the language of literacy and culture.[35][36] The most prosperous period of the Abkhazian kingdom was between 850 and 950. A bitter civil war and feudal revolts which began under Demetrius III (r. 967–975) led the kingdom into complete anarchy under the unfortunate king Theodosius III the Blind (r.975–978). A period of unrest ensued, which ended as Abkhazia and eastern Georgian states were unified under a single Georgian monarchy, ruled by King Bagrat III of Georgia (r.975–1014), due largely to the diplomacy and conquests of his energetic foster-father David III of Tao (r. 966–1001).
+The stage of feudalism's development and struggle against common invaders as much as common belief of various Georgian states had an enormous importance for spiritual and political unification of Georgia feudal monarchy under the Bagrationi dynasty in 11th century.
+The Kingdom of Georgia reached its zenith in the 12th to early 13th centuries. This period during the reigns of David IV (r.1089–1125) and his granddaughter Tamar (r.1184–1213) has been widely termed as Georgia's Golden Age or the Georgian Renaissance.[38] This early Georgian renaissance, which preceded its Western European analogue, was characterized by impressive military victories, territorial expansion, and a cultural renaissance in architecture, literature, philosophy and the sciences.[39] The Golden age of Georgia left a legacy of great cathedrals, romantic poetry and literature, and the epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin, the latter which is considered a national epic.[40][41]
+David suppressed dissent of feudal lords and centralized the power in his hands to effectively deal with foreign threats. In 1121, he decisively defeated much larger Turkish armies during the Battle of Didgori and liberated Tbilisi.[42]
+The 29-year reign of Tamar, the first female ruler of Georgia, is considered the most successful in Georgian history.[43] Tamar was given the title "king of kings" (mepe mepeta).[37] She succeeded in neutralizing opposition and embarked on an energetic foreign policy aided by the downfall of the rival powers of the Seljuks and Byzantium. Supported by a powerful military élite, Tamar was able to build on the successes of her predecessors to consolidate an empire which dominated the Caucasus, and extended over large parts of present-day Azerbaijan, Armenia, and eastern Turkey as well as parts of northern Iran,[44] until its collapse under the Mongol attacks within two decades after Tamar's death in 1213.[45]
+The revival of the Kingdom of Georgia was set back after Tbilisi was captured and destroyed by the Khwarezmian leader Jalal ad-Din in 1226.[46] The Mongols were expelled by George V of Georgia (r.1299–1302), son of Demetrius II of Georgia (r.1270–1289), who was named "Brilliant" for his role in restoring the country's previous strength and Christian culture. George V was the last great king of the unified Georgian state. After his death, different local rulers fought for their independence from central Georgian rule, until the total disintegration of the Kingdom in the 15th century. Georgia was further weakened by several disastrous invasions by Tamerlane. Invasions continued, giving the kingdom no time for restoration, with both Black and White sheep Turkomans constantly raiding its southern provinces.
+The Kingdom of Georgia collapsed into anarchy by 1466 and fragmented into three independent kingdoms and five semi-independent principalities. Neighboring large empires subsequently exploited the internal division of the weakened country, and beginning in the 16th century up to the late 18th century, Safavid Iran (and successive Iranian Afsharid and Qajar dynasties) and Ottoman Turkey subjugated the eastern and western regions of Georgia, respectively.[47]
+The rulers of regions that remained partly autonomous organized rebellions on various occasions. However, subsequent Iranian and Ottoman invasions further weakened local kingdoms and regions. As a result of incessant Ottoman–Persian Wars and deportations, the population of Georgia dwindled to 250,000 inhabitants at the end of the 18th century.[citation needed] Eastern Georgia (Safavid Georgia), composed of the regions of Kartli and Kakheti, had been under Iranian suzerainty since 1555 following the Peace of Amasya signed with neighbouring rivalling Ottoman Turkey. With the death of Nader Shah in 1747, both kingdoms broke free of Iranian control and were reunified through a personal union under the energetic king Heraclius II in 1762. Heraclius, who had risen to prominence through the Iranian ranks, was awarded the crown of Kartli by Nader himself in 1744 for his loyal service to him.[48] Heraclius nevertheless stabilized Eastern Georgia to a degree in the ensuing period and was able to guarantee its autonomy throughout the Iranian Zand period.[49]
+In 1783, Russia and the eastern Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, by which Georgia abjured any dependence on Persia or another power, and made the kingdom a protectorate of Russia, which guaranteed Georgia's territorial integrity and the continuation of its reigning Bagrationi dynasty in return for prerogatives in the conduct of Georgian foreign affairs.[50]
+However, despite this commitment to defend Georgia, Russia rendered no assistance when the Iranians invaded in 1795, capturing and sacking Tbilisi while massacring its inhabitants, as the new heir to the throne sought to reassert Iranian hegemony over Georgia.[51] Despite a punitive campaign subsequently launched against Qajar Iran in 1796, this period culminated in the 1801 Russian violation of the Treaty of Georgievsk and annexation of eastern Georgia, followed by the abolition of the royal Bagrationi dynasty, as well as the autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Pyotr Bagration, one of the descendants of the abolished house of Bagrationi, would later join the Russian army and rise to be a prominent general in the Napoleonic wars.[52]
+On 22 December 1800, Tsar Paul I of Russia, at the alleged request of the Georgian King George XII, signed the proclamation on the incorporation of Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) within the Russian Empire, which was finalized by a decree on 8 January 1801,[53][54] and confirmed by Tsar Alexander I on 12 September 1801.[55][56] The Bagrationi royal family was deported from the kingdom. The Georgian envoy in Saint Petersburg reacted with a note of protest that was presented to the Russian vice-chancellor Prince Kurakin.[57] In May 1801, under the oversight of General Carl Heinrich von Knorring, Imperial Russia transferred power in eastern Georgia to the government headed by General Ivan Petrovich Lazarev.[58] The Georgian nobility did not accept the decree until 12 April 1802, when Knorring assembled the nobility at the Sioni Cathedral and forced them to take an oath on the Imperial Crown of Russia. Those who disagreed were temporarily arrested.[59]
+In the summer of 1805, Russian troops on the Askerani River near Zagam defeated the Iranian army during the 1804–13 Russo-Persian War and saved Tbilisi from reconquest now that it was officially part of the Imperial territories. Russian suzerainty over eastern Georgia was officially finalized with Iran in 1813 following the Treaty of Gulistan.[60] Following the annexation of eastern Georgia, the western Georgian kingdom of Imereti was annexed by Tsar Alexander I. The last Imeretian king and the last Georgian Bagrationi ruler, Solomon II, died in exile in 1815, after attempts to rally people against Russia and to enlist foreign support against the latter, had been in vain.[61] From 1803 to 1878, as a result of numerous Russian wars now against Ottoman Turkey, several of Georgia's previously lost territories – such as Adjara – were recovered, and also incorporated into the empire. The principality of Guria was abolished and incorporated into the Empire in 1829, while Svaneti was gradually annexed in 1858. Mingrelia, although a Russian protectorate since 1803, was not absorbed until 1867.[62]
+After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic was established with Nikolay Chkheidze acting as its president. The federation consisted of three nations: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. As the Ottomans advanced into the Caucasian territories of the crumbling Russian Empire, Georgia declared independence on 26 May 1918. The Menshevik Social Democratic Party of Georgia won the parliamentary election and its leader, Noe Zhordania, became prime minister. Despite the Soviet takeover, Zhordania was recognized as the legitimate head of the Georgian Government by France, UK, Belgium, and Poland through the 1930s.[63]
+The 1918 Georgian–Armenian War, which erupted over parts of disputed provinces between Armenia and Georgia populated mostly by Armenians, ended because of British intervention. In 1918–1919, Georgian general Giorgi Mazniashvili led an attack against the White Army led by Moiseev and Denikin in order to claim the Black Sea coastline from Tuapse to Sochi and Adler for the independent Georgia.[64] The country's independence did not last long. Georgia was under British protection from 1918–1920.[citation needed]
+In February 1921, during the Russian Civil War, the Red Army advanced into Georgia and brought the local Bolsheviks to power. The Georgian army was defeated and the Social Democratic government fled the country. On 25 February 1921, the Red Army entered Tbilisi and established a government of workers' and peasants' soviets with Filipp Makharadze as acting head of state. Georgia was incorporated into the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, alongside Armenia and Azerbaijan, in 1921 which in 1922 would become a founding member of the Soviet Union.
+There remained significant opposition to the Bolsheviks in Georgia, which was unindustrialized and viewed as socially backward, and this culminated in the August Uprising of 1924. Soviet rule was firmly established only after the insurrection was swiftly defeated.[65] Georgia would remain an unindustrialized periphery of the USSR until the first five-year plan when it would become a major center for textile goods. Later, in 1936, the TSFSR was dissolved and Georgia emerged as a union republic: the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.
+Joseph Stalin, an ethnic Georgian born Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი) in Gori, was prominent among the Bolsheviks.[66] Stalin was to rise to the highest position, leading the Soviet Union from the mid–1920s until his death on 5 March 1953.
+In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on an immediate course towards Caucasian oil fields and munitions factories. They never reached Georgia, however, and almost 700,000 Georgians fought in the Red Army to repel the invaders and advance towards Berlin. Of them, an estimated 350,000 were killed.[67] The Georgian uprising on Texel against the Germans was the last battle of the World War II.
+After Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union and implemented a policy of de-Stalinization. This was nowhere else more publicly and violently opposed than in Georgia, where in 1956 riots broke out upon the release of Khruschev's public denunciation of Stalin and led to the death of nearly 100 students.
+Throughout the remainder of the Soviet period, Georgia's economy continued to grow and experience significant improvement, though it increasingly exhibited blatant corruption and alienation of the government from the people. With the beginning of perestroika in 1986, the Georgian Communist leadership proved so incapable of handling the changes that most Georgians, including rank and file Communists, concluded that the only way forward was a break from the existing Soviet system.
+On 9 April 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Council of Georgia declared independence after a referendum held on 31 March 1991.[68] On 26 May 1991, Gamsakhurdia was elected as the first President of independent Georgia. Gamsakhurdia stoked Georgian nationalism and vowed to assert Tbilisi's authority over regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia that had been classified as autonomous oblasts under the Soviet Union.[69]
+He was soon deposed in a bloody coup d'état, from 22 December 1991 to 6 January 1992. The coup was instigated by part of the National Guards and a paramilitary organization called "Mkhedrioni" ("horsemen"). The country became embroiled in a bitter civil war, which lasted until nearly 1995. Eduard Shevardnadze (Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1991) returned to Georgia in 1992 and joined the leaders of the coup—Tengiz Kitovani and Jaba Ioseliani—to head a triumvirate called "The State Council".[citation needed]
+Simmering disputes within two regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, between local separatists and the majority Georgian populations, erupted into widespread inter-ethnic violence and wars.[69] Supported by Russia,[citation needed] Abkhazia and South Ossetia achieved de facto independence from Georgia, with Georgia retaining control only in small areas of the disputed territories.[69] In 1995, Shevardnadze was officially elected as president of Georgia.[citation needed]
+During the War in Abkhazia (1992–1993), roughly 230,000 to 250,000 Georgians[70] were expelled from Abkhazia by Abkhaz separatists and North Caucasian volunteers (including Chechens). Around 23,000 Georgians[71] fled South Ossetia as well, and many Ossetian families were forced to abandon their homes in the Borjomi region and moved to Russia.[citation needed]
+In 2003, Shevardnadze (who won re-election in 2000) was deposed by the Rose Revolution, after Georgian opposition and international monitors asserted that 2 November parliamentary elections were marred by fraud.[72] The revolution was led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze, former members and leaders of Shevardnadze's ruling party. Mikheil Saakashvili was elected as President of Georgia in 2004.[73]
+Following the Rose Revolution, a series of reforms were launched to strengthen the country's military and economic capabilities. The new government's efforts to reassert Georgian authority in the southwestern autonomous republic of Ajaria led to a major crisis early in 2004. Success in Ajaria encouraged Saakashvili to intensify his efforts, but without success, in breakaway South Ossetia.[citation needed]
+These events, along with accusations of Georgian involvement in the Second Chechen War,[74] resulted in a severe deterioration of relations with Russia, fuelled also by Russia's open assistance and support to the two secessionist areas. Despite these increasingly difficult relations, in May 2005 Georgia and Russia reached a bilateral agreement[75] by which Russian military bases (dating back to the Soviet era) in Batumi and Akhalkalaki were withdrawn. Russia withdrew all personnel and equipment from these sites by December 2007[76] while failing to withdraw from the Gudauta base in Abkhazia, which it was required to vacate after the adoption of the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty during the 1999 Istanbul summit.[77]
+Tensions between Georgia and Russia began escalating in April 2008.[78][79][80] A bomb explosion on 1 August 2008 targeted a car transporting Georgian peacekeepers. South Ossetians were responsible for instigating this incident, which marked the opening of hostilities and injured five Georgian servicemen. In response,[81] several South Ossetian militiamen were hit.[82] South Ossetian separatists began shelling Georgian villages on 1 August. These artillery attacks caused Georgian servicemen to return fire periodically since 1 August.[78][82][83][84][85]
+On 30 September 2009, the European Union–sponsored Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia stated that, while preceded by months of mutual provocations, "open hostilities began with a large-scale Georgian military operation against the town of Tskhinvali and the surrounding areas, launched in the night of 7 to 8 August 2008."[86][87]
+At around 19:00 on 7 August 2008, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili announced a unilateral ceasefire and called for peace talks.[88] However, escalating assaults against Georgian villages (located in the South Ossetian conflict zone) were soon matched with gunfire from Georgian troops,[89][90] who then proceeded to move in the direction of the capital of the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia (Tskhinvali) on the night of 8 August, reaching its centre in the morning of 8 August.[91] One Georgian diplomat told Russian newspaper Kommersant on 8 August that by taking control of Tskhinvali, Tbilisi wanted to demonstrate that Georgia would not tolerate the killing of Georgian citizens.[92] According to Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer, the Ossetian provocation was aimed at triggering the Georgian response, which was needed as a pretext for premeditated Russian military invasion.[93] According to Georgian intelligence,[94] and several Russian media reports, parts of the regular (non-peacekeeping) Russian Army had already moved to South Ossetian territory through the Roki Tunnel before the Georgian military action.[95]
+Russia accused Georgia of "aggression against South Ossetia",[96] and launched a large-scale land, air and sea invasion of Georgia with the pretext of "peace enforcement" operation on 8 August 2008.[84] Russian airstrikes against targets within Georgia were also launched.[97] Abkhaz forces opened a second front on 9 August by attacking the Kodori Gorge, held by Georgia.[98] Tskhinvali was seized by the Russian military by 10 August.[97] Russian forces occupied the Georgian cities of Zugdidi,[99] Senaki,[100] Poti,[101] and Gori (the last one after the ceasefire agreement was negotiated).[102] Russian Black Sea Fleet blockaded the Georgian coast.[84]
+South Ossetians conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Georgians in South Ossetia,[103] destroying Georgian villages around Tskhinvali after the war had ended.[104] The war displaced 192,000 people,[105] and while many were able to return to their homes after the war, a year later around 30,000 ethnic Georgians remained displaced.[106] In an interview published in Kommersant, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity said he would not allow Georgians to return.[107][108]
+President of France Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated a ceasefire agreement on 12 August 2008.[109] On 17 August, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russian forces would begin to pull out of Georgia the following day.[110] Russia recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as separate republics on 26 August.[111] In response to Russia's recognition, the Georgian government severed diplomatic relations with Russia.[112] Russian forces left the buffer areas bordering Abkhazia and South Ossetia on 8 October, and the European Union Monitoring Mission in Georgia was dispatched to the buffer areas.[113] Since the war, Georgia has maintained that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are Russian-occupied Georgian territories.[114][115]
+Georgia is a representative democratic parliamentary republic, with the President as the head of state, and Prime Minister as the head of government. The executive branch of power is made up of the Cabinet of Georgia. The Cabinet is composed of ministers, headed by the Prime Minister, and appointed by the President. Salome Zurabishvili is the current President of Georgia after winning 59.52% of the vote in the 2018 Georgian presidential election. Since 2018, Mamuka Bakhtadze has been the Prime Minister of Georgia.
+Legislative authority is vested in the Parliament of Georgia. It is unicameral and has 150 members, known as deputies, of whom 73 are elected by plurality to represent single-member districts, and 77 are chosen to represent parties by proportional representation. Members of parliament are elected for four-year terms. On 26 May 2012, Saakashvili inaugurated a new Parliament building in the western city of Kutaisi, in an effort to decentralise power and shift some political control closer to Abkhazia.[116] The elections in October 2012 resulted in the victory for the opposition "Georgian Dream – Democratic Georgia" coalition, which President Saakashvili acknowledged on the following day.[117]
+Different opinions exist regarding the degree of political freedom in Georgia. Saakashvili believed in 2008 that the country is "on the road to becoming a European democracy."[118] Freedom House lists Georgia as a partly free country.[119]
+In preparation for 2012 parliamentary elections, Parliament adopted a new electoral code on 27 December 2011 that incorporated many recommendations from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Venice Commission. However, the new code failed to address the Venice Commission's primary recommendation to strengthen the equality of the vote by reconstituting single-mandate election districts to be comparable in size. On 28 December, Parliament amended the Law on Political Unions to regulate campaign and political party financing. Local and international observers raised concerns about several amendments, including the vagueness of the criteria for determining political bribery and which individuals and organizations would be subject to the law. As of March 2012[update], Parliament was discussing further amendments to address these concerns.[120]
+Georgia maintains good relations with its direct neighbours (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey) and is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Community of Democratic Choice, the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development[121] and the Asian Development Bank.[122] Georgia also maintains political, economic, and military relations with France,[123] Germany,[124] Israel,[125] Japan,[126] South Korea,[127] Sri Lanka,[128] Turkey,[129] Ukraine,[130] the United States,[131] and many other countries.[132]
+The growing U.S. and European Union influence in Georgia, notably through proposed EU and NATO membership, the U.S. Train and Equip military assistance program, and the construction of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline have frequently strained Tbilisi's relations with Moscow. Georgia's decision to boost its presence in the coalition forces in Iraq was an important initiative.[133]
+Georgia is currently working to become a full member of NATO. In August 2004, the Individual Partnership Action Plan of Georgia was submitted officially to NATO. On 29 October 2004, the North Atlantic Council of NATO approved the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) of Georgia, and Georgia moved on to the second stage of Euro–Atlantic Integration. In 2005, by the decision of the President of Georgia, a state commission was set up to implement the Individual Partnership Action Plan, which presents an interdepartmental group headed by the Prime Minister. The commission was tasked with coordinating and controlling the implementation of the Individual Partnership Action Plan.[citation needed]
+On 14 February 2005, the agreement on the appointment of Partnership for Peace (PfP) liaison officer between Georgia and NATO came into force, whereby a liaison officer for the South Caucasus was assigned to Georgia. On 2 March 2005, the agreement was signed on the provision of the host nation support to and transit of NATO forces and NATO personnel. On 6–9 March 2006, the IPAP implementation interim assessment team arrived in Tbilisi. On 13 April 2006, the discussion of the assessment report on implementation of the Individual Partnership Action Plan was held at NATO Headquarters, within 26+1 format.[134] In 2006, the Georgian parliament voted unanimously for the bill which calls for integration of Georgia into NATO.[citation needed] The majority of Georgians and politicians in Georgia support the push for NATO membership.[135]
+In September 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that "NATO approaching our borders is a threat to Russia."[136] He was quoted as saying that if NATO accepts Georgian membership with the article on collective defense covering only Tbilisi-administered territory (i.e., excluding the Georgian territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are currently Russian-supported unrecognized breakaway republics), "we will not start a war, but such conduct will undermine our relations with NATO and with countries who are eager to enter the alliance."[137]
+George W. Bush became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country.[138] The street leading to Tbilisi International Airport has since been dubbed George W. Bush Avenue.[139] On 2 October 2006, Georgia and the European Union signed a joint statement on the agreed text of the Georgia–European Union Action Plan within the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The Action Plan was formally approved at the EU–Georgia Cooperation Council session on 14 November 2006, in Brussels.[140] In June 2014, the EU and Georgia signed an Association Agreement, which entered into force on 1 July 2016.[141] On 13 December 2016, EU and Georgia reached the agreement on visa liberalisation for Georgian citizens.[142] On 27 February 2017, the Council adopted a regulation on visa liberalisation for Georgians travelling to the EU for a period of stay of 90 days in any 180-day period.[143]
+Georgia's military is organized into land and air forces. They are collectively known as the Georgian Armed Forces (GAF).[144] The mission and functions of the GAF are based on the Constitution of Georgia, Georgia's Law on Defense and National Military Strategy, and international agreements to which Georgia is signatory. They are performed under the guidance and authority of the Ministry of Defense.[citation needed] The military budget of Georgia for 2017 is 748₾ million, by 78₾ million more than in 2016. The biggest part, 62.5% of the military budget is allocated for maintaining armored forces readiness and potency development.[145] After its independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia began to develop its own military industry. The first exhibition of products made by STC Delta was in 1999.[146] STC Delta now produces a variety of military equipment, including armored vehicles, artillery systems, aviation systems, personal protection equipment, and small arms.[147]
+During later periods of the Iraq War Georgia had up to 2,000 soldiers serving in the Multi-National Force.[148] Georgia also participated in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. With 1,560 troops in 2013, it was at that time the largest non-NATO[149] and the largest per capita[150][151] troop contributor. Over 11,000 Georgian soldiers have been rotated through Afghanistan.[152] As of 2015[update], 31 Georgian servicemen have died in Afghanistan,[153] most during the Helmand campaign, and 435 were wounded, including 35 amputees.[154][155]
+In Georgia, law enforcement is conducted and provided for by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia. In recent years, the Patrol Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia has undergone a radical transformation, with the police having now absorbed a great many duties previously performed by dedicated independent government agencies. New duties performed by the police include border security and customs functions and contracted security provision; the latter function is performed by the dedicated 'security police'. Intelligence collecting in the interests of national security is now the remit of the Georgian Intelligence Service.[citation needed]
+In 2005, President Mikheil Saakashvili fired the entire traffic police force (numbering around 30,000 police officers) of the Georgian National Police due to corruption.[156][157] A new force was then subsequently built around new recruits.[156] The US State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law-Enforcement Affairs has provided assistance to the training efforts and continues to act in an advisory capacity.[158]
+The new Patruli force was first introduced in the summer of 2005 to replace the traffic police, a force which was accused of widespread corruption.[159] The police introduced an 022 (currently 112) emergency dispatch service in 2004.[160]
+Human rights in Georgia are guaranteed by the country's constitution. There is an independent human rights public defender elected by the Parliament of Georgia to ensure such rights are enforced.[161] Georgia has ratified the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in 2005. NGO "Tolerance", in its alternative report about its implementation, speaks of a rapid decrease in the number of Azerbaijani schools and cases of appointing headmasters to Azerbaijani schools who do not speak the Azerbaijani language.[162]
+The government came under criticism for its alleged use of excessive force on 26 May 2011 when it dispersed protesters led by Nino Burjanadze, among others, with tear gas and rubber bullets after they refused to clear Rustaveli avenue for an independence day parade despite the expiration of their demonstration permit and despite being offered to choose an alternative venue.[163][164][165][166] While human rights activists maintained that the protests were peaceful, the government pointed out that many protesters were masked and armed with heavy sticks and molotov cocktails.[167] Georgian opposition leader Nino Burjanadze said the accusations of planning a coup were baseless, and that the protesters' actions were legitimate.[166][168]
+Georgia is divided into 9 regions, 1 city, and 2 autonomous republics.[144] These in turn are subdivided into 67 districts and 12 self-governing cities.[169]
+Georgia contains two official autonomous regions, of which one has declared independence. Officially autonomous within Georgia,[170] the de facto independent region of Abkhazia declared independence in 1999.[171] In addition, another territory not officially autonomous has also declared independence. South Ossetia is officially known by Georgia as the Tskinvali region, as it views "South Ossetia" as implying political bonds with Russian North Ossetia.[172] It was called South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast when Georgia was part of Soviet Union. Its autonomous status was revoked in 1990. De facto separate since Georgian independence, offers were made to give South Ossetia autonomy again, but in 2006 an unrecognised referendum in the area resulted in a vote for independence.[172]
+In both Abkhazia and South Ossetia large numbers of people had been given Russian passports, some through a process of forced passportization by Russian authorities.[173] This was used as a justification for Russian invasion of Georgia during the 2008 South Ossetia war after which Russia recognised the region's independence.[174] Georgia considers the regions as occupied by Russia.[114][175] Both republics have received minimal international recognition.
+Adjara under local strongman Aslan Abashidze maintained close ties with Russia and allowed a Russian military base to be maintained in Batumi. Upon the election of Mikheil Saakashvili in 2004 tensions rose between Abashidze and the Georgian government, leading to demonstrations in Adjara and the resignation and flight of Abashidze. The region retains autonomy, and as a sign of Ajaria's reconnection with the central Georgian government, the Georgian Constitutional Court was moved from T'bilisi to Batumi.[176]
+Georgia is mostly situated in the South Caucasus, while parts of the country are also located in the North Caucasus.[177][178] The country lies between latitudes 41° and 44° N, and longitudes 40° and 47° E, with an area of 67,900 km2 (26,216 sq mi). It is a very mountainous country. The Likhi Range divides the country into eastern and western halves.[179] Historically, the western portion of Georgia was known as Colchis while the eastern plateau was called Iberia. Because of a complex geographic setting, mountains also isolate the northern region of Svaneti from the rest of Georgia.[citation needed]
+The Greater Caucasus Mountain Range forms the northern border of Georgia.[179] The main roads through the mountain range into Russian territory lead through the Roki Tunnel between Shida Kartli and North Ossetia and the Darial Gorge (in the Georgian region of Khevi). The Roki Tunnel was vital for the Russian military in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War because it is the only direct route through the Caucasus Mountains. The southern portion of the country is bounded by the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.[179] The Greater Caucasus Mountain Range is much higher in elevation than the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, with the highest peaks rising more than 5,000 meters (16,404 ft) above sea level.
+The highest mountain in Georgia is Mount Shkhara at 5,068 meters (16,627 ft), and the second highest is Mount Janga (Dzhangi–Tau) at 5,059 m (16,598 ft) above sea level. Other prominent peaks include Mount Kazbek at 5,047 m (16,558 ft), Shota Rustaveli 4,860 m (15,945 ft), Tetnuldi 4,858 m (15,938 ft), Mt. Ushba 4,700 m (15,420 ft), and Ailama 4,547 m (14,918 ft).[179] Out of the abovementioned peaks, only Kazbek is of volcanic origin. The region between Kazbek and Shkhara (a distance of about 200 km (124 mi) along the Main Caucasus Range) is dominated by numerous glaciers. Out of the 2,100 glaciers that exist in the Caucasus today, approximately 30% are located within Georgia.[citation needed]
+The term Lesser Caucasus Mountains is often used to describe the mountainous (highland) areas of southern Georgia that are connected to the Greater Caucasus Mountain Range by the Likhi Range.[179] The area can be split into two separate sub-regions; the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, which run parallel to the Greater Caucasus Range, and the Southern Georgia Volcanic Highland, which lies immediately to the south of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.[citation needed]
+The overall region can be characterized as being made up of various, interconnected mountain ranges (largely of volcanic origin) and plateaus that do not exceed 3,400 meters (11,155 ft) in elevation. Prominent features of the area include the Javakheti Volcanic Plateau, lakes, including Tabatskuri and Paravani, as well as mineral water and hot springs. Two major rivers in Georgia are the Rioni and the Mtkvari. The Southern Georgia Volcanic Highland is a young and unstable geologic region with high seismic activity and has experienced some of the most significant earthquakes that have been recorded in Georgia.[citation needed]
+The Krubera Cave is the deepest known cave in the world. It is located in the Arabika Massif of the Gagra Range, in Abkhazia. In 2001, a Russian–Ukrainian team had set the world depth record for a cave at 1,710 meters (5,610 ft). In 2004, the penetrated depth was increased on each of three expeditions, when a Ukrainian team crossed the 2,000-meter (6,562 ft) mark for the first time in the history of speleology. In October 2005, an unexplored part was found by the CAVEX team, further increasing the known depth of the cave. This expedition confirmed the known depth of the cave at 2,140 meters (7,021 ft).[citation needed]
+The landscape within the nation's boundaries is quite varied. Western Georgia's landscape ranges from low-land marsh-forests, swamps, and temperate rainforests to eternal snows and glaciers, while the eastern part of the country even contains a small segment of semi-arid plains. Forests cover around 40% of Georgia's territory while the alpine/subalpine zone accounts for roughly around 10 percent of the land.[citation needed]
+Much of the natural habitat in the low-lying areas of western Georgia has disappeared during the past 100 years because of the agricultural development of the land and urbanization. The large majority of the forests that covered the Colchis plain are now virtually non-existent with the exception of the regions that are included in the national parks and reserves (e.g. Lake Paliastomi area). At present, the forest cover generally remains outside of the low-lying areas and is mainly located along the foothills and the mountains. Western Georgia's forests consist mainly of deciduous trees below 600 meters (1,969 ft) above sea level and contain species such as oak, hornbeam, beech, elm, ash, and chestnut. Evergreen species such as box may also be found in many areas. Ca. 1000 of all 4000 higher plants of Georgia are endemic to this country.[180]
+The west-central slopes of the Meskheti Range in Ajaria as well as several locations in Samegrelo and Abkhazia are covered by temperate rain forests. Between 600–1,000 metres (1,969–3,281 ft) above sea level, the deciduous forest becomes mixed with both broad-leaf and coniferous species making up the plant life. The zone is made up mainly of beech, spruce, and fir forests. From 1,500–1,800 metres (4,921–5,906 ft), the forest becomes largely coniferous. The tree line generally ends at around 1,800 metres (5,906 ft) and the alpine zone takes over, which in most areas, extends up to an elevation of 3,000 metres (9,843 ft) above sea level. The eternal snow and glacier zone lies above the 3,000-metre line.[citation needed]
+Eastern Georgia's landscape (referring to the territory east of the Likhi Range) is considerably different from that of the west, although, much like the Colchis plain in the west, nearly all of the low-lying areas of eastern Georgia including the Mtkvari and Alazani River plains have been deforested for agricultural purposes. In addition, because of the region's relatively drier climate, some of the low-lying plains (especially in Kartli and south-eastern Kakheti) were never covered by forests in the first place.[citation needed]
+The general landscape of eastern Georgia comprises numerous valleys and gorges that are separated by mountains. In contrast with western Georgia, nearly 85 percent of the forests of the region are deciduous. Coniferous forests only dominate in the Borjomi Gorge and in the extreme western areas. Out of the deciduous species of trees, beech, oak, and hornbeam dominate. Other deciduous species include several varieties of maple, aspen, ash, and hazelnut. The Upper Alazani River Valley contains yew forests.[citation needed]
+At higher elevations above 1,000 metres (3,281 ft) above sea level (particularly in the Tusheti, Khevsureti, and Khevi regions), pine and birch forests dominate. In general, the forests in eastern Georgia occur between 500–2,000 metres (1,640–6,562 ft) above sea level, with the alpine zone extending from 2,000–2,300 to 3,000–3,500 metres (6,562–7,546 to 9,843–11,483 ft). The only remaining large, low-land forests remain in the Alazani Valley of Kakheti. The eternal snow and glacier zone lies above the 3,500-metre (11,483 ft) line in most areas of eastern Georgia.[citation needed]
+The climate of Georgia is extremely diverse, considering the nation's small size. There are two main climatic zones, roughly corresponding to the eastern and western parts of the country. The Greater Caucasus Mountain Range plays an important role in moderating Georgia's climate and protects the nation from the penetration of colder air masses from the north. The Lesser Caucasus Mountains partially protect the region from the influence of dry and hot air masses from the south.[citation needed]
+Much of western Georgia lies within the northern periphery of the humid subtropical zone with annual precipitation ranging from 1,000–4,000 mm (39.4–157.5 in). The precipitation tends to be uniformly distributed throughout the year, although the rainfall can be particularly heavy during the Autumn months. The climate of the region varies significantly with elevation and while much of the lowland areas of western Georgia are relatively warm throughout the year, the foothills and mountainous areas (including both the Greater and Lesser Caucasus Mountains) experience cool, wet summers and snowy winters (snow cover often exceeds 2 meters in many regions). Ajaria is the wettest region of the Caucasus, where the Mt. Mtirala rainforest, east of Kobuleti, receives around 4,500 mm (177.2 in) of precipitation per year.[citation needed]
+Eastern Georgia has a transitional climate from humid subtropical to continental. The region's weather patterns are influenced both by dry Caspian air masses from the east and humid Black Sea air masses from the west. The penetration of humid air masses from the Black Sea is often blocked by mountain ranges (Likhi and Meskheti) that separate the eastern and western parts of the nation. Annual precipitation is considerably less than that of western Georgia and ranges from 400–1,600 mm (15.7–63.0 in).[citation needed]
+The wettest periods generally occur during spring and autumn, while winter and summer months tend to be the driest. Much of eastern Georgia experiences hot summers (especially in the low-lying areas) and relatively cold winters. As in the western parts of the nation, elevation plays an important role in eastern Georgia where climatic conditions above 1,500 metres (4,921 ft) are considerably colder than in the low-lying areas. The regions that lie above 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) frequently experience frost even during the summer months.[citation needed]
+Because of its high landscape diversity and low latitude, Georgia is home to about 5,601 species of animals, including 648 species of vertebrates (more than 1% of the species found worldwide) and many of these species are endemics.[181] A number of large carnivores live in the forests, namely Brown bears, wolves, lynxes and Caucasian Leopards. The common pheasant (also known as the Colchian Pheasant) is an endemic bird of Georgia which has been widely introduced throughout the rest of the world as an important game bird. The species number of invertebrates is considered to be very high but data is distributed across a high number of publications. The spider checklist of Georgia, for example, includes 501 species.[182] The Rioni River may contain a breeding population of the critically endangered bastard sturgeon.[183]
+Slightly more than 6,500 species of fungi, including lichen-forming species, have been recorded from Georgia,[184][185] but this number is far from complete. The true total number of fungal species occurring in Georgia, including species not yet recorded, is likely to be far higher, given the generally accepted estimate that only about seven percent of all fungi worldwide have so far been discovered.[186] Although the amount of available information is still very small, a first effort has been made to estimate the number of fungal species endemic to Georgia, and 2,595 species have been tentatively identified as possible endemics of the country.[187] 1,729 species of plants have been recorded from Georgia in association with fungi.[185] According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are 4,300 species of vascular plants in Georgia.[188]
+Archaeological research demonstrates that Georgia has been involved in commerce with many lands and empires since ancient times, largely due its location on the Black Sea and later on the historical Silk Road. Gold, silver, copper and iron have been mined in the Caucasus Mountains. Georgian wine making is a very old tradition and a key branch of the country's economy. The country has sizable hydropower resources.[189] Throughout Georgia's modern history agriculture and tourism have been principal economic sectors, because of the country's climate and topography.[144]
+For much of the 20th century, Georgia's economy was within the Soviet model of command economy. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Georgia embarked on a major structural reform designed to transition to a free market economy. As with all other post-Soviet states, Georgia faced a severe economic collapse. The civil war and military conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia aggravated the crisis. The agriculture and industry output diminished. By 1994 the gross domestic product had shrunk to a quarter of that of 1989.[190] The first financial help from the West came in 1995, when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund granted Georgia a credit of US$206 million and Germany granted DM 50 million.[citation needed]
+Since the early 21st century visible positive developments have been observed in the economy of Georgia. In 2007, Georgia's real GDP growth rate reached 12 percent, making Georgia one of the fastest-growing economies in Eastern Europe.[144] The World Bank dubbed Georgia "the number one economic reformer in the world" because it has in one year improved from rank 112th to 18th in terms of ease of doing business.[191] Georgia improved its position to 6th in World Bank's Doing Business report 2019.[192] The country has a high unemployment rate of 12.6% and has fairly low median income compared to European countries.[citation needed]
+The 2006 ban on imports of Georgian wine to Russia, one of Georgia's biggest trading partners, and break of financial links was described by the IMF Mission as an "external shock".[193] In addition, Russia increased the price of gas for Georgia. Around the same time, the National Bank of Georgia stated that ongoing inflation in the country was mainly triggered by external reasons, including Russia's economic embargo.[194] The Georgian authorities expected that the current account deficit due to the embargo in 2007 would be financed by "higher foreign exchange proceeds generated by the large inflow of foreign direct investment" and an increase in tourist revenues.[195] The country has also maintained a solid credit in international market securities.[196] Georgia is becoming more integrated into the global trading network: its 2015 imports and exports account for 50% and 21% of GDP respectively.[144] Georgia's main imports are fuels, vehicles, machinery and parts, grain and other foods, pharmaceuticals. Main exports are vehicles, ferro-alloys, fertilizers, nuts, scrap metal, gold, copper ores.[144]
+Georgia is developing into an international transport corridor through Batumi and Poti ports, Baku–Tbilisi–Kars Railway line, an oil pipeline from Baku through Tbilisi to Ceyhan, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) and a parallel gas pipeline, the South Caucasus Pipeline.[197]
+Since coming to power the Saakashvili administration accomplished a series of reforms aimed at improving tax collection. Among other things a flat income tax was introduced in 2004.[198] As a result, budget revenues have increased fourfold and a once large budget deficit has turned into a surplus.[199][144][200]
+As of 2001, 54 percent of the population lived below the national poverty line but by 2006 poverty decreased to 34 percent, by 2015 it is 10.1 percent.[201] In 2015, the average monthly income of a household was 1,022.3₾ (about $426).[202] 2015 calculations place Georgia's nominal GDP at US$13.98 billion.[203] Georgia's economy is becoming more devoted to services (as of 2016[update], representing 68.3 percent of GDP), moving away from the agricultural sector (9.2 percent).[144]
+In regards to telecommunication infrastructure, Georgia is ranked the last among its bordering neighbors in the World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index (NRI) – an indicator for determining the development level of a country's information and communication technologies. Georgia ranked number 58 overall in the 2016 NRI ranking,[204] up from 60 in 2015.[205]
+Tourism is an increasingly significant part of the Georgian economy. In 2016, 2,714,773 tourists brought approximately US$2.16 billion to the country.[206] According to the government, there are 103 resorts in different climatic zones in Georgia. Tourist attractions include more than 2,000 mineral springs, over 12,000 historical and cultural monuments, four of which are recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Bagrati Cathedral in Kutaisi and Gelati Monastery, historical monuments of Mtskheta, and Upper Svaneti).[207] In 2018, more than 1.4 million tourists from Russia visited Georgia.[208]
+Today transport in Georgia is provided by rail, road, ferry, and air. Total length of roads excluding occupied territories is 20,553 kilometers and railways – 1,576 km.[209] Positioned in the Caucasus and on the coast of the Black Sea, Georgia is a key country through which energy imports to the European Union from neighbouring Azerbaijan pass. Traditionally, the country was located on an important north–south trade route between European Russia and the Near East and Turkey.[citation needed]
+In recent years Georgia has invested large amounts of money in the modernization of its transport networks. The construction of new highways has been prioritized and, as such, major cities like Tbilisi have seen the quality of their roads improve dramatically; despite this however, the quality of inter-city routes remains poor and to date only one motorway-standard road has been constructed – the ს 1.[210]
+The Georgian railways represent an important transport artery for the Caucasus, as they make up the largest proportion of a route linking the Black and Caspian Seas. In turn, this has allowed them to benefit in recent years from increased energy exports from neighbouring Azerbaijan to the European Union, Ukraine, and Turkey.[211] Passenger services are operated by the state-owned Georgian Railway whilst freight operations are carried out by a number of licensed operators. Since 2004 the Georgian Railways have been undergoing a rolling program of fleet-renewal and managerial restructuring which is aimed at making the service provided more efficient and comfortable for passengers.[212] Infrastructural development has also been high on the agenda for the railways, with the key Tbilisi railway junction expected to undergo major reorganisation in the near future.[213] Additional projects also include the construction of the economically important Kars–Tbilisi–Baku railway, which was opened on 30 October 2017 and connects much of the Caucasus with Turkey by standard gauge railway.[214][215]
+Air and maritime transport is developing in Georgia, with the former mainly used by passengers and the latter for transport of freight. Georgia currently has four international airports, the largest of which is by far Tbilisi International Airport, hub for Georgian Airways, which offers connections to many large European cities. Other airports in the country are largely underdeveloped or lack scheduled traffic, although, as of late, efforts have been made to solve both these problems.[216] There are a number of seaports along Georgia's Black Sea coast, the largest and most busy of which is the Port of Batumi; whilst the town is itself a seaside resort, the port is a major cargo terminal in the Caucasus and is often used by neighbouring Azerbaijan as a transit point for making energy deliveries to Europe. Scheduled and chartered passenger ferry services link Georgia with Bulgaria,[217] Romania, Turkey and Ukraine.[218]
+Like most native Caucasian peoples, the Georgians do not fit into any of the main ethnic categories of Europe or Asia. The Georgian language, the most pervasive of the Kartvelian languages, is not Indo-European, Turkic, or Semitic. The present day Georgian or Kartvelian nation is thought to have resulted from the fusion of aboriginal, autochthonous inhabitants with immigrants who moved into South Caucasus from the direction of Anatolia in remote antiquity.[219]
+Ethnic Georgians form about 86.8 percent of Georgia's current population of 3,713,804 (2014 census).[221][n 1] Other ethnic groups include Abkhazians, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, Greeks, Jews, Kists, Ossetians, Russians, Ukrainians, Yezidis and others.[221][n 1] The Georgian Jews are one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Once Georgia was also home to significant ethnic German communities, but most Germans were deported during World War II.[222]
+The 1989 census recorded 341,000 ethnic Russians, or 6.3 percent of the population,[223] 52,000 Ukrainians and 100,000 Greeks in Georgia.[224] Since 1990, 1.5 million Georgian nationals have left.[224] At least 1 million emigrants from Georgia legally or illegally reside in Russia.[225] Georgia's net migration rate is −4.54, excluding Georgian nationals who live abroad.[citation needed] Georgia has nonetheless been inhabited by immigrants from all over the world throughout its independence. According to 2014 statistics, Georgia gets most of its immigrants from Russia (51.6%), Greece (8.3%), Ukraine (8.11%), Germany (4.3%), and Armenia (3.8%).[226][n 1]
+In the early 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, violent separatist conflicts broke out in the autonomous region of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region. Many Ossetians living in Georgia left the country, mainly to Russia's North Ossetia.[227] On the other hand, more than 150,000 Georgians left Abkhazia after the breakout of hostilities in 1993.[228] Of the Meskhetian Turks who were forcibly relocated in 1944 only a tiny fraction returned to Georgia as of 2008[update].[229]
+The most widespread language group is the Kartvelian family, which includes Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz.[230][231][232][233][234][235] The official languages of Georgia are Georgian, with Abkhaz having official status within the autonomous region of Abkhazia. Georgian is the primary language of 87.7 percent of the population, followed by 6.2 percent speaking Azerbaijani, 3.9 percent Armenian, 1.2 percent Russian, and 1 percent other languages.[236][n 1] In the 2010, the United States federal government began the Teach and Learn English with Georgia program of promoting English literacy in elementary school. The goal was to import English speakers from across the world to ensure that all children in Georgia spoke English in four years and replace Russian as a second language.[237]
+Today 83.4 percent of the population practices Eastern Orthodox Christianity, with the majority of these adhering to the national Georgian Orthodox Church.[239][n 1] The Georgian Orthodox Church is one of the world's most ancient Christian Churches, and claims apostolic foundation by Saint Andrew.[240] In the first half of the 4th century, Christianity was adopted as the state religion of Iberia (present-day Kartli, or eastern Georgia), following the missionary work of Saint Nino of Cappadocia.[241][242] The Church gained autocephaly during the early Middle Ages; it was abolished during the Russian domination of the country, restored in 1917 and fully recognised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1989.[243]
+The special status of the Georgian Orthodox Church is officially recognised in the Constitution of Georgia and the Concordat of 2002, although religious institutions are separate from the state, and every citizen has the right of religion.[citation needed]
+[n 1]
+Main religions (2014)[9]
+Religious minorities of Georgia include Muslims (10.7 percent), Armenian Christians (2.9 percent) and Roman Catholics (0.5 percent).[239][n 1] 0.7 percent of those recorded in the 2014 census declared themselves to be adherents of other religions, 1.2 percent refused or did not state their religion and 0.5 percent declared no religion at all.[239]
+Islam is represented by both Azerbaijani Shia Muslims (in the south-east) ethnic Georgian Sunni Muslims in Adjara, and Laz-speaking Sunni Muslims as well as Sunni Meskhetian Turks along the border with Turkey. In Abkhazia, a minority of the Abkhaz population is also Sunni Muslim, alongside the faithful of the revived Abkhaz pagan faith. There are also smaller communities of Greek Muslims (of Pontic Greek origin) and Armenian Muslims, both of whom are descended from Ottoman-era converts to Turkish Islam from Eastern Anatolia who settled in Georgia following the Lala Mustafa Pasha's Caucasian campaign that led to the Ottoman conquest of the country in 1578. Georgian Jews trace the history of their community to the 6th century BC; their numbers have dwindled in the last decades due to high levels of immigration to Israel.[244]
+Despite the long history of religious harmony in Georgia,[245] there have been instances of religious discrimination and violence against "nontraditional faiths", such as Jehovah's Witnesses, by followers of the defrocked Orthodox priest Basil Mkalavishvili.[246]
+In addition to traditional religious organizations, Georgia retains secular and irreligious segments of society (0.5 percent),[247] as well as a significant portion of religiously affiliated individuals who do not actively practice their faith.[248]
+The education system of Georgia has undergone sweeping modernizing, although controversial, reforms since 2004.[249][250] Education in Georgia is mandatory for all children aged 6–14.[251] The school system is divided into elementary (six years; age level 6–12), basic (three years; age level 12–15), and secondary (three years; age level 15–18), or alternatively vocational studies (two years). Students with a secondary school certificate have access to higher education. Only the students who have passed the Unified National Examinations may enroll in a state-accredited higher education institution, based on ranking of the scores received at the exams.[252]
+Most of these institutions offer three levels of study: a Bachelor's Program (three to four years); a Master's Program (two years), and a Doctoral Program (three years). There is also a Certified Specialist's Program that represents a single-level higher education program lasting from three to six years.[251][253] As of 2016[update], 75 higher education institutions are accredited by the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia.[254] Gross primary enrollment ratio was 117 percent for the period of 2012–2014, the 2nd highest in Europe after Sweden.[255]
+Tbilisi has become the main artery of the Georgian educational system, particularly since the creation of the First Georgian Republic in 1918 permitted the establishment of modern, Georgian-language educational institutions. Tbilisi is the home to several major institutions of higher education in Georgia, notably the Tbilisi State Medical University, which was founded as Tbilisi Medical Institute in 1918, and the Tbilisi State University (TSU), which was established in 1918 and remains the oldest university in the entire Caucasus region.[256] With enrollment of over 35,000 students, the number of faculty and staff (collaborators) at TSU is approximately 5,000. Georgia's main and largest technical university, Georgian Technical University,[257] as well as The University of Georgia (Tbilisi),[258] Caucasus University[259] and Free University of Tbilisi[260] are also in Tbilisi.
+Georgian culture evolved over thousands of years from its foundations in the Iberian and Colchian civilizations.[261] Georgian culture enjoyed a renaissance and golden age of classical literature, arts, philosophy, architecture and science in the 11th century.[262] Georgian culture was influenced by Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the various Iranian empires (notably the Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanian, Safavid and Qajar empires),[263][264][265][266] and later, from the 19th century, by the Russian Empire.
+The Georgian language, and the Classical Georgian literature of the poet Shota Rustaveli, were revived in the 19th century after a long period of turmoil, laying the foundations of the romantics and novelists of the modern era such as Grigol Orbeliani, Nikoloz Baratashvili, Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Vazha-Pshavela.[267] The Georgian language is written in three unique scripts, which according to traditional accounts were invented by King Pharnavaz I of Iberia in the 3rd century BC.[268][269]
+Georgia is known for its folklore, traditional music, dances, theatre, cinema, and art. Notable painters from the 20th century include Niko Pirosmani, Lado Gudiashvili, Elene Akhvlediani; notable ballet choreographers include George Balanchine, Vakhtang Chabukiani, and Nino Ananiashvili; notable poets include Galaktion Tabidze, Lado Asatiani, and Mukhran Machavariani; and notable theatre and film directors include Robert Sturua, Tengiz Abuladze, Giorgi Danelia and Otar Ioseliani.[267]
+Georgian architecture has been influenced by many civilizations. There are several different architectural styles for castles, towers, fortifications and churches. The Upper Svaneti fortifications, and the castle town of Shatili in Khevsureti, are some of the finest examples of medieval Georgian castle architecture. Other architectural aspects of Georgia include Rustaveli avenue in Tbilisi in the Haussmann style, and the Old Town District.[citation needed]
+Georgian ecclesiastic art is one of the most notable aspects of Georgian Christian architecture, which combines the classical dome style with the original basilica style, forming what is known as the Georgian cross-dome style. Cross-dome architecture developed in Georgia during the 9th century; before that, most Georgian churches were basilicas. Other examples of Georgian ecclesiastic architecture can be found outside Georgia: Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria (built in 1083 by the Georgian military commander Grigorii Bakuriani), Iviron monastery in Greece (built by Georgians in the 10th century), and the Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem (built by Georgians in the 9th century). One of the most famous late 19th/early 20th century Georgian artists was primitivist painter Niko Pirosmani.[270]
+Television, magazines, and newspapers in Georgia are all operated by both state-owned and for-profit corporations which depend on advertising, subscription, and other sales-related revenues. The Constitution of Georgia guarantees freedom of speech. As a country in transition, the Georgian media system is under transformation.[citation needed]
+The media environment of Georgia remains the freest and most diverse in the South Caucasus,[271] despite the long-term politicisation and polarisation affecting the sector. The political struggle for control over the public broadcaster have left it without a direction in 2014 too.[272]
+A large percentage of Georgian households have a television, and most have at least one radio. Most of Georgia's media companies are headquartered in its capital and largest city, Tbilisi.[citation needed]
+Georgia has an ancient musical tradition, which is primarily known for its early development of polyphony. Georgian polyphony is based on three vocal parts, a unique tuning system based on perfect fifths, and a harmonic structure rich in parallel fifths and dissonances.[citation needed] Three types of polyphony have developed in Georgia: a complex version in Svaneti, a dialogue over a bass background in the Kakheti region, and a three-part partially-improvised version in western Georgia.[273] The Georgian folk song "Chakrulo" was one of 27 musical compositions included on the Voyager Golden Records that were sent into space on Voyager 2 on 20 August 1977.[274]
+Georgian cuisine and wine have evolved through the centuries, adapting traditions in each era. One of the most unusual traditions of dining is supra, or Georgian table, which is also a way of socialising with friends and family. The head of supra is known as tamada. He also conducts the highly philosophical toasts, and makes sure that everyone is enjoying themselves. Various historical regions of Georgia are known for their particular dishes: for example, khinkali (meat dumplings), from eastern mountainous Georgia, and khachapuri, mainly from Imereti, Samegrelo and Adjara. In addition to traditional Georgian dishes, the foods of other countries have been brought to Georgia by immigrants from Russia, Greece, and recently China.[citation needed]
+The most popular sports in Georgia are football, basketball, rugby union, wrestling, judo, and weightlifting. Historically, Georgia has been famous for its physical education; the Romans were fascinated with Georgians' physical qualities after seeing the training techniques of ancient Iberia.[275] Wrestling remains a historically important sport of Georgia, and some historians think that the Greco-Roman style of wrestling incorporates many Georgian elements.[276]
+Within Georgia, one of the most popularized styles of wrestling is the Kakhetian style. There were a number of other styles in the past that are not as widely used today. For example, the Khevsureti region of Georgia has three different styles of wrestling. Other popular sports in 19th century Georgia were polo, and Lelo, a traditional Georgian game later replaced by rugby union.[citation needed]
+The first and only race circuit in the Caucasian region is located in Georgia. Rustavi International Motorpark originally built in 1978 was re-opened in 2012 after total reconstruction[277] costing $20 million. The track satisfies the FIA Grade 2 requirements and currently hosts the Legends car racing series and Formula Alfa competitions.[278]
+Basketball was always one of the notable sports in Georgia, and Georgia had a few very famous Soviet Union national team members, such as Otar Korkia, Mikheil Korkia, Zurab Sakandelidze and Levan Moseshvili. Dinamo Tbilisi won the prestigious Euroleague competition in 1962. Georgia had five players in the NBA: Vladimir Stepania, Jake Tsakalidis, Nikoloz Tskitishvili, Tornike Shengelia and current Golden State Warriors center Zaza Pachulia. Other notable basketball players are two times Euroleague champion Giorgi Shermadini and Euroleague players Manuchar Markoishvili and Viktor Sanikidze. Sport is regaining its popularity in the country in recent years. Georgia national basketball team qualified to EuroBasket during the last three tournaments since 2011.[citation needed]
+The following are links to the international rankings of Georgia.

en/2194.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,268 @@

+Coordinates: 42°00′N 43°30′E / 42.000°N 43.500°E / 42.000; 43.500
+Georgia (Georgian: საქართველო, translit.: sakartvelo) is a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the south by Turkey and Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi. Georgia covers a territory of 69,700 square kilometres (26,911 sq mi), and its approximate population is about 3.718 million. Georgia is a unitary parliamentary republic, with the government elected through a representative democracy.
+During the classical era, several independent kingdoms became established in what is now Georgia, such as Colchis and Iberia. The Georgians officially adopted Christianity in the early 4th century. The Georgian Orthodox Church had enormous importance for the spiritual and political unification of early Georgian states. The unified Kingdom of Georgia reached its Golden Age during the reign of King David the Builder and Queen Tamar the Great in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Thereafter, the kingdom declined and eventually disintegrated under the hegemony of various regional powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire and successive dynasties of Iran. In the late 18th century, the eastern Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti forged an alliance with the Russian Empire, which directly annexed the kingdom in 1801 and conquered the western Kingdom of Imereti in 1810. Russian rule over Georgia was eventually acknowledged in various peace treaties with Iran and the Ottomans and the remaining Georgian territories were absorbed by the Russian Empire in a piecemeal fashion through the course of the 19th century.
+During the Civil War following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Georgia briefly became part of the Transcaucasian Federation and then emerged as an independent republic before the Russian army invasion in 1921, which established a government of workers' and peasants' soviets. Soviet Georgia would be incorporated into a new Transcaucasian Federation that, in 1922, would be a founding republic of the Soviet Union. In 1936, the Transcaucasian Federation was dissolved and Georgia emerged as a Union Republic. During World War II, almost 700,000 Georgians fought in the Red Army against the Germans. After Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a native Georgian, died in 1953, a wave of protest spread against Nikita Khrushchev and his de-Stalinization reforms, leading to the death of nearly one hundred students in 1956.
+By the 1980s, an independence movement was established and grew, leading to Georgia's secession from the Soviet Union in April 1991. For most of the following decade, post-Soviet Georgia suffered from civil conflicts, secessionist wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and economic crisis. Following the bloodless Rose Revolution in 2003, Georgia strongly pursued a pro-Western foreign policy; aimed at NATO and European integration, it introduced a series of democratic and economic reforms. This brought about mixed results, but strengthened state institutions. The country's Western orientation soon led to the worsening of relations with Russia, culminating in the brief Russo-Georgian War in August 2008 and Georgia's current territorial dispute with Russia.
+Georgia is a developing country and ranks 70th on the Human Development Index. The country is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development. It contains two de facto independent regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which gained very limited international recognition after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Most of the world's countries consider the regions to be Georgian territory under Russian occupation.[10]
+"Georgia" probably stems from the Persian designation of the Georgians – gurğān, in the 11th and 12th centuries adapted via Syriac gurz-ān/gurz-iyān and Arabic ĵurĵan/ĵurzan. Lore-based theories were given by the traveller Jacques de Vitry, who explained the name's origin by the popularity of St. George amongst Georgians,[11] while traveller Jean Chardin thought that "Georgia" came from Greek γεωργός ("tiller of the land"). As Prof. Alexander Mikaberidze adds, these century-old explanations for the word Georgia/Georgians are rejected by the scholarly community, who point to the Persian word gurğ/gurğān ("wolf"[12]) as the root of the word.[13] Starting with the Persian word gurğ/gurğān, the word was later adopted in numerous other languages, including Slavic and West European languages.[13][14] This term itself might have been established through the ancient Iranian appellation of the near-Caspian region, which was referred to as Gorgan ("land of the wolves").[13][15]
+The native name is Sakartvelo (საქართველო; "land of Kartvelians"), derived from the core central Georgian region of Kartli, recorded from the 9th century, and in extended usage referring to the entire medieval Kingdom of Georgia by the 13th century. The self-designation used by ethnic Georgians is Kartvelebi (ქართველები, i.e. "Kartvelians").
+The medieval Georgian Chronicles present an eponymous ancestor of the Kartvelians, Kartlos, a great-grandson of Japheth. However, scholars agree that the word is derived from the Karts, the latter being one of the proto-Georgian tribes that emerged as a dominant group in ancient times.[13] The name Sakartvelo (საქართველო) consists of two parts. Its root, kartvel-i (ქართველ-ი), specifies an inhabitant of the core central-eastern Georgian region of Kartli, or Iberia as it is known in sources of the Eastern Roman Empire.[16] Ancient Greeks (Strabo, Herodotus, Plutarch, Homer, etc.) and Romans (Titus Livius, Tacitus, etc.) referred to early western Georgians as Colchians and eastern Georgians as Iberians (Iberoi in some Greek sources).[17] The Georgian circumfix sa-X-o is a standard geographic construction designating "the area where X dwell", where X is an ethnonym.[18]
+Today the full, official name of the country is "Georgia", as specified in the official English version of the Georgian constitution which reads "Georgia shall be the name of the State of Georgia."[19] Before the 1995 constitution came into force the country's name was the Republic of Georgia.[b]
+The territory of modern-day Georgia was inhabited by Homo erectus since the Paleolithic Era. The proto-Georgian tribes first appear in written history in the 12th century BC.[20] The earliest evidence of wine to date has been found in Georgia, where 8000-year old wine jars were uncovered.[21][22] Archaeological finds and references in ancient sources also reveal elements of early political and state formations characterized by advanced metallurgy and goldsmith techniques that date back to the 7th century BC and beyond.[20] In fact, early metallurgy started in Georgia during the 6th millennium BC, associated with the Shulaveri-Shomu culture.[23]
+The classical period saw the rise of a number of early Georgian states, the principal of which were Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east. In Greek mythology, Colchis was the location of the Golden Fleece sought by Jason and the Argonauts in Apollonius Rhodius' epic tale Argonautica. The incorporation of the Golden Fleece into the myth may have derived from the local practice of using fleeces to sift gold dust from rivers.[24] In the 4th century BC, a kingdom of Iberia – an early example of advanced state organization under one king and an aristocratic hierarchy – was established.[25]
+After the Roman Republic completed its brief conquest of what is now Georgia in 66 BC, the area became a primary objective of what would eventually turn out to be over 700 years of protracted Irano–Roman geo-political rivalry and warfare.[26][27] From the first centuries A.D, the cult of Mithras, pagan beliefs, and Zoroastrianism were commonly practised in Georgia.[28] In 337 AD King Mirian III declared Christianity as the state religion, giving a great stimulus to the development of literature, arts, and ultimately playing a key role in the formation of the unified Georgian nation,[29][30] The acceptance led to the slow but sure decline of Zoroastrianism,[31] which until the 5th century AD, appeared to have become something like a second established religion in Iberia (eastern Georgia), and was widely practised there.[32]
+Located on the crossroads of protracted Roman–Persian wars, the early Georgian kingdoms disintegrated into various feudal regions by the early Middle Ages. This made it easy for the remaining Georgian realms to fall prey to the early Muslim conquests in the 7th century.
+The extinction of the different Iberian royal dynasties, such as Guaramids and the Chosroids,[33] and also the Abbasid preoccupation with their own civil wars and conflict with the Byzantine Empire, led to the Bagrationi family's growth in prominence. The head of the Bagrationi dynasty Ashot I of Iberia (r.813–826), who had migrated to the former southwestern territories of Iberia, came to rule over Tao-Klarjeti and restored the Principate of Iberia in 813. The sons and grandsons of Ashot I established three separate branches, frequently struggling with each other and with neighboring rulers. The Kartli line prevailed; in 888 Adarnase IV of Iberia (r.888–923) restored the indigenous royal authority dormant since 580. Despite the revitalization of the Iberian monarchy, remaining Georgian lands were divided among rival authorities, with Tbilisi remaining in Arab hands.
+An Arab incursion into western Georgia led by Marwan II, was repelled by Leon I (r.720–740) jointly with his Lazic and Iberian allies in 736. Leon I then married Mirian's daughter, and a successor, Leon II exploited this dynastic union to acquire Lazica in the 770s.[34] The successful defense against the Arabs, and new territorial gains, gave the Abkhazian princes enough power to claim more autonomy from the Byzantine Empire. Towards circa 778, Leon II (r.780–828) won his full independence with the help of the Khazars and was crowned as the king of Abkhazia. After obtaining independence for the state, the matter of church independence became the main problem. In the early 9th century the Abkhazian Church broke away from the Constantinople and recognized the authority of the Catholicate of Mtskheta; Georgian language replaced Greek as the language of literacy and culture.[35][36] The most prosperous period of the Abkhazian kingdom was between 850 and 950. A bitter civil war and feudal revolts which began under Demetrius III (r. 967–975) led the kingdom into complete anarchy under the unfortunate king Theodosius III the Blind (r.975–978). A period of unrest ensued, which ended as Abkhazia and eastern Georgian states were unified under a single Georgian monarchy, ruled by King Bagrat III of Georgia (r.975–1014), due largely to the diplomacy and conquests of his energetic foster-father David III of Tao (r. 966–1001).
+The stage of feudalism's development and struggle against common invaders as much as common belief of various Georgian states had an enormous importance for spiritual and political unification of Georgia feudal monarchy under the Bagrationi dynasty in 11th century.
+The Kingdom of Georgia reached its zenith in the 12th to early 13th centuries. This period during the reigns of David IV (r.1089–1125) and his granddaughter Tamar (r.1184–1213) has been widely termed as Georgia's Golden Age or the Georgian Renaissance.[38] This early Georgian renaissance, which preceded its Western European analogue, was characterized by impressive military victories, territorial expansion, and a cultural renaissance in architecture, literature, philosophy and the sciences.[39] The Golden age of Georgia left a legacy of great cathedrals, romantic poetry and literature, and the epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin, the latter which is considered a national epic.[40][41]
+David suppressed dissent of feudal lords and centralized the power in his hands to effectively deal with foreign threats. In 1121, he decisively defeated much larger Turkish armies during the Battle of Didgori and liberated Tbilisi.[42]
+The 29-year reign of Tamar, the first female ruler of Georgia, is considered the most successful in Georgian history.[43] Tamar was given the title "king of kings" (mepe mepeta).[37] She succeeded in neutralizing opposition and embarked on an energetic foreign policy aided by the downfall of the rival powers of the Seljuks and Byzantium. Supported by a powerful military élite, Tamar was able to build on the successes of her predecessors to consolidate an empire which dominated the Caucasus, and extended over large parts of present-day Azerbaijan, Armenia, and eastern Turkey as well as parts of northern Iran,[44] until its collapse under the Mongol attacks within two decades after Tamar's death in 1213.[45]
+The revival of the Kingdom of Georgia was set back after Tbilisi was captured and destroyed by the Khwarezmian leader Jalal ad-Din in 1226.[46] The Mongols were expelled by George V of Georgia (r.1299–1302), son of Demetrius II of Georgia (r.1270–1289), who was named "Brilliant" for his role in restoring the country's previous strength and Christian culture. George V was the last great king of the unified Georgian state. After his death, different local rulers fought for their independence from central Georgian rule, until the total disintegration of the Kingdom in the 15th century. Georgia was further weakened by several disastrous invasions by Tamerlane. Invasions continued, giving the kingdom no time for restoration, with both Black and White sheep Turkomans constantly raiding its southern provinces.
+The Kingdom of Georgia collapsed into anarchy by 1466 and fragmented into three independent kingdoms and five semi-independent principalities. Neighboring large empires subsequently exploited the internal division of the weakened country, and beginning in the 16th century up to the late 18th century, Safavid Iran (and successive Iranian Afsharid and Qajar dynasties) and Ottoman Turkey subjugated the eastern and western regions of Georgia, respectively.[47]
+The rulers of regions that remained partly autonomous organized rebellions on various occasions. However, subsequent Iranian and Ottoman invasions further weakened local kingdoms and regions. As a result of incessant Ottoman–Persian Wars and deportations, the population of Georgia dwindled to 250,000 inhabitants at the end of the 18th century.[citation needed] Eastern Georgia (Safavid Georgia), composed of the regions of Kartli and Kakheti, had been under Iranian suzerainty since 1555 following the Peace of Amasya signed with neighbouring rivalling Ottoman Turkey. With the death of Nader Shah in 1747, both kingdoms broke free of Iranian control and were reunified through a personal union under the energetic king Heraclius II in 1762. Heraclius, who had risen to prominence through the Iranian ranks, was awarded the crown of Kartli by Nader himself in 1744 for his loyal service to him.[48] Heraclius nevertheless stabilized Eastern Georgia to a degree in the ensuing period and was able to guarantee its autonomy throughout the Iranian Zand period.[49]
+In 1783, Russia and the eastern Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, by which Georgia abjured any dependence on Persia or another power, and made the kingdom a protectorate of Russia, which guaranteed Georgia's territorial integrity and the continuation of its reigning Bagrationi dynasty in return for prerogatives in the conduct of Georgian foreign affairs.[50]
+However, despite this commitment to defend Georgia, Russia rendered no assistance when the Iranians invaded in 1795, capturing and sacking Tbilisi while massacring its inhabitants, as the new heir to the throne sought to reassert Iranian hegemony over Georgia.[51] Despite a punitive campaign subsequently launched against Qajar Iran in 1796, this period culminated in the 1801 Russian violation of the Treaty of Georgievsk and annexation of eastern Georgia, followed by the abolition of the royal Bagrationi dynasty, as well as the autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Pyotr Bagration, one of the descendants of the abolished house of Bagrationi, would later join the Russian army and rise to be a prominent general in the Napoleonic wars.[52]
+On 22 December 1800, Tsar Paul I of Russia, at the alleged request of the Georgian King George XII, signed the proclamation on the incorporation of Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) within the Russian Empire, which was finalized by a decree on 8 January 1801,[53][54] and confirmed by Tsar Alexander I on 12 September 1801.[55][56] The Bagrationi royal family was deported from the kingdom. The Georgian envoy in Saint Petersburg reacted with a note of protest that was presented to the Russian vice-chancellor Prince Kurakin.[57] In May 1801, under the oversight of General Carl Heinrich von Knorring, Imperial Russia transferred power in eastern Georgia to the government headed by General Ivan Petrovich Lazarev.[58] The Georgian nobility did not accept the decree until 12 April 1802, when Knorring assembled the nobility at the Sioni Cathedral and forced them to take an oath on the Imperial Crown of Russia. Those who disagreed were temporarily arrested.[59]
+In the summer of 1805, Russian troops on the Askerani River near Zagam defeated the Iranian army during the 1804–13 Russo-Persian War and saved Tbilisi from reconquest now that it was officially part of the Imperial territories. Russian suzerainty over eastern Georgia was officially finalized with Iran in 1813 following the Treaty of Gulistan.[60] Following the annexation of eastern Georgia, the western Georgian kingdom of Imereti was annexed by Tsar Alexander I. The last Imeretian king and the last Georgian Bagrationi ruler, Solomon II, died in exile in 1815, after attempts to rally people against Russia and to enlist foreign support against the latter, had been in vain.[61] From 1803 to 1878, as a result of numerous Russian wars now against Ottoman Turkey, several of Georgia's previously lost territories – such as Adjara – were recovered, and also incorporated into the empire. The principality of Guria was abolished and incorporated into the Empire in 1829, while Svaneti was gradually annexed in 1858. Mingrelia, although a Russian protectorate since 1803, was not absorbed until 1867.[62]
+After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic was established with Nikolay Chkheidze acting as its president. The federation consisted of three nations: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. As the Ottomans advanced into the Caucasian territories of the crumbling Russian Empire, Georgia declared independence on 26 May 1918. The Menshevik Social Democratic Party of Georgia won the parliamentary election and its leader, Noe Zhordania, became prime minister. Despite the Soviet takeover, Zhordania was recognized as the legitimate head of the Georgian Government by France, UK, Belgium, and Poland through the 1930s.[63]
+The 1918 Georgian–Armenian War, which erupted over parts of disputed provinces between Armenia and Georgia populated mostly by Armenians, ended because of British intervention. In 1918–1919, Georgian general Giorgi Mazniashvili led an attack against the White Army led by Moiseev and Denikin in order to claim the Black Sea coastline from Tuapse to Sochi and Adler for the independent Georgia.[64] The country's independence did not last long. Georgia was under British protection from 1918–1920.[citation needed]
+In February 1921, during the Russian Civil War, the Red Army advanced into Georgia and brought the local Bolsheviks to power. The Georgian army was defeated and the Social Democratic government fled the country. On 25 February 1921, the Red Army entered Tbilisi and established a government of workers' and peasants' soviets with Filipp Makharadze as acting head of state. Georgia was incorporated into the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, alongside Armenia and Azerbaijan, in 1921 which in 1922 would become a founding member of the Soviet Union.
+There remained significant opposition to the Bolsheviks in Georgia, which was unindustrialized and viewed as socially backward, and this culminated in the August Uprising of 1924. Soviet rule was firmly established only after the insurrection was swiftly defeated.[65] Georgia would remain an unindustrialized periphery of the USSR until the first five-year plan when it would become a major center for textile goods. Later, in 1936, the TSFSR was dissolved and Georgia emerged as a union republic: the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.
+Joseph Stalin, an ethnic Georgian born Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი) in Gori, was prominent among the Bolsheviks.[66] Stalin was to rise to the highest position, leading the Soviet Union from the mid–1920s until his death on 5 March 1953.
+In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on an immediate course towards Caucasian oil fields and munitions factories. They never reached Georgia, however, and almost 700,000 Georgians fought in the Red Army to repel the invaders and advance towards Berlin. Of them, an estimated 350,000 were killed.[67] The Georgian uprising on Texel against the Germans was the last battle of the World War II.
+After Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union and implemented a policy of de-Stalinization. This was nowhere else more publicly and violently opposed than in Georgia, where in 1956 riots broke out upon the release of Khruschev's public denunciation of Stalin and led to the death of nearly 100 students.
+Throughout the remainder of the Soviet period, Georgia's economy continued to grow and experience significant improvement, though it increasingly exhibited blatant corruption and alienation of the government from the people. With the beginning of perestroika in 1986, the Georgian Communist leadership proved so incapable of handling the changes that most Georgians, including rank and file Communists, concluded that the only way forward was a break from the existing Soviet system.
+On 9 April 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Council of Georgia declared independence after a referendum held on 31 March 1991.[68] On 26 May 1991, Gamsakhurdia was elected as the first President of independent Georgia. Gamsakhurdia stoked Georgian nationalism and vowed to assert Tbilisi's authority over regions such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia that had been classified as autonomous oblasts under the Soviet Union.[69]
+He was soon deposed in a bloody coup d'état, from 22 December 1991 to 6 January 1992. The coup was instigated by part of the National Guards and a paramilitary organization called "Mkhedrioni" ("horsemen"). The country became embroiled in a bitter civil war, which lasted until nearly 1995. Eduard Shevardnadze (Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1991) returned to Georgia in 1992 and joined the leaders of the coup—Tengiz Kitovani and Jaba Ioseliani—to head a triumvirate called "The State Council".[citation needed]
+Simmering disputes within two regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, between local separatists and the majority Georgian populations, erupted into widespread inter-ethnic violence and wars.[69] Supported by Russia,[citation needed] Abkhazia and South Ossetia achieved de facto independence from Georgia, with Georgia retaining control only in small areas of the disputed territories.[69] In 1995, Shevardnadze was officially elected as president of Georgia.[citation needed]
+During the War in Abkhazia (1992–1993), roughly 230,000 to 250,000 Georgians[70] were expelled from Abkhazia by Abkhaz separatists and North Caucasian volunteers (including Chechens). Around 23,000 Georgians[71] fled South Ossetia as well, and many Ossetian families were forced to abandon their homes in the Borjomi region and moved to Russia.[citation needed]
+In 2003, Shevardnadze (who won re-election in 2000) was deposed by the Rose Revolution, after Georgian opposition and international monitors asserted that 2 November parliamentary elections were marred by fraud.[72] The revolution was led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze, former members and leaders of Shevardnadze's ruling party. Mikheil Saakashvili was elected as President of Georgia in 2004.[73]
+Following the Rose Revolution, a series of reforms were launched to strengthen the country's military and economic capabilities. The new government's efforts to reassert Georgian authority in the southwestern autonomous republic of Ajaria led to a major crisis early in 2004. Success in Ajaria encouraged Saakashvili to intensify his efforts, but without success, in breakaway South Ossetia.[citation needed]
+These events, along with accusations of Georgian involvement in the Second Chechen War,[74] resulted in a severe deterioration of relations with Russia, fuelled also by Russia's open assistance and support to the two secessionist areas. Despite these increasingly difficult relations, in May 2005 Georgia and Russia reached a bilateral agreement[75] by which Russian military bases (dating back to the Soviet era) in Batumi and Akhalkalaki were withdrawn. Russia withdrew all personnel and equipment from these sites by December 2007[76] while failing to withdraw from the Gudauta base in Abkhazia, which it was required to vacate after the adoption of the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty during the 1999 Istanbul summit.[77]
+Tensions between Georgia and Russia began escalating in April 2008.[78][79][80] A bomb explosion on 1 August 2008 targeted a car transporting Georgian peacekeepers. South Ossetians were responsible for instigating this incident, which marked the opening of hostilities and injured five Georgian servicemen. In response,[81] several South Ossetian militiamen were hit.[82] South Ossetian separatists began shelling Georgian villages on 1 August. These artillery attacks caused Georgian servicemen to return fire periodically since 1 August.[78][82][83][84][85]
+On 30 September 2009, the European Union–sponsored Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia stated that, while preceded by months of mutual provocations, "open hostilities began with a large-scale Georgian military operation against the town of Tskhinvali and the surrounding areas, launched in the night of 7 to 8 August 2008."[86][87]
+At around 19:00 on 7 August 2008, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili announced a unilateral ceasefire and called for peace talks.[88] However, escalating assaults against Georgian villages (located in the South Ossetian conflict zone) were soon matched with gunfire from Georgian troops,[89][90] who then proceeded to move in the direction of the capital of the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia (Tskhinvali) on the night of 8 August, reaching its centre in the morning of 8 August.[91] One Georgian diplomat told Russian newspaper Kommersant on 8 August that by taking control of Tskhinvali, Tbilisi wanted to demonstrate that Georgia would not tolerate the killing of Georgian citizens.[92] According to Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer, the Ossetian provocation was aimed at triggering the Georgian response, which was needed as a pretext for premeditated Russian military invasion.[93] According to Georgian intelligence,[94] and several Russian media reports, parts of the regular (non-peacekeeping) Russian Army had already moved to South Ossetian territory through the Roki Tunnel before the Georgian military action.[95]
+Russia accused Georgia of "aggression against South Ossetia",[96] and launched a large-scale land, air and sea invasion of Georgia with the pretext of "peace enforcement" operation on 8 August 2008.[84] Russian airstrikes against targets within Georgia were also launched.[97] Abkhaz forces opened a second front on 9 August by attacking the Kodori Gorge, held by Georgia.[98] Tskhinvali was seized by the Russian military by 10 August.[97] Russian forces occupied the Georgian cities of Zugdidi,[99] Senaki,[100] Poti,[101] and Gori (the last one after the ceasefire agreement was negotiated).[102] Russian Black Sea Fleet blockaded the Georgian coast.[84]
+South Ossetians conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Georgians in South Ossetia,[103] destroying Georgian villages around Tskhinvali after the war had ended.[104] The war displaced 192,000 people,[105] and while many were able to return to their homes after the war, a year later around 30,000 ethnic Georgians remained displaced.[106] In an interview published in Kommersant, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity said he would not allow Georgians to return.[107][108]
+President of France Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated a ceasefire agreement on 12 August 2008.[109] On 17 August, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced that Russian forces would begin to pull out of Georgia the following day.[110] Russia recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as separate republics on 26 August.[111] In response to Russia's recognition, the Georgian government severed diplomatic relations with Russia.[112] Russian forces left the buffer areas bordering Abkhazia and South Ossetia on 8 October, and the European Union Monitoring Mission in Georgia was dispatched to the buffer areas.[113] Since the war, Georgia has maintained that Abkhazia and South Ossetia are Russian-occupied Georgian territories.[114][115]
+Georgia is a representative democratic parliamentary republic, with the President as the head of state, and Prime Minister as the head of government. The executive branch of power is made up of the Cabinet of Georgia. The Cabinet is composed of ministers, headed by the Prime Minister, and appointed by the President. Salome Zurabishvili is the current President of Georgia after winning 59.52% of the vote in the 2018 Georgian presidential election. Since 2018, Mamuka Bakhtadze has been the Prime Minister of Georgia.
+Legislative authority is vested in the Parliament of Georgia. It is unicameral and has 150 members, known as deputies, of whom 73 are elected by plurality to represent single-member districts, and 77 are chosen to represent parties by proportional representation. Members of parliament are elected for four-year terms. On 26 May 2012, Saakashvili inaugurated a new Parliament building in the western city of Kutaisi, in an effort to decentralise power and shift some political control closer to Abkhazia.[116] The elections in October 2012 resulted in the victory for the opposition "Georgian Dream – Democratic Georgia" coalition, which President Saakashvili acknowledged on the following day.[117]
+Different opinions exist regarding the degree of political freedom in Georgia. Saakashvili believed in 2008 that the country is "on the road to becoming a European democracy."[118] Freedom House lists Georgia as a partly free country.[119]
+In preparation for 2012 parliamentary elections, Parliament adopted a new electoral code on 27 December 2011 that incorporated many recommendations from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Venice Commission. However, the new code failed to address the Venice Commission's primary recommendation to strengthen the equality of the vote by reconstituting single-mandate election districts to be comparable in size. On 28 December, Parliament amended the Law on Political Unions to regulate campaign and political party financing. Local and international observers raised concerns about several amendments, including the vagueness of the criteria for determining political bribery and which individuals and organizations would be subject to the law. As of March 2012[update], Parliament was discussing further amendments to address these concerns.[120]
+Georgia maintains good relations with its direct neighbours (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey) and is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the World Trade Organization, the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Community of Democratic Choice, the GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development[121] and the Asian Development Bank.[122] Georgia also maintains political, economic, and military relations with France,[123] Germany,[124] Israel,[125] Japan,[126] South Korea,[127] Sri Lanka,[128] Turkey,[129] Ukraine,[130] the United States,[131] and many other countries.[132]
+The growing U.S. and European Union influence in Georgia, notably through proposed EU and NATO membership, the U.S. Train and Equip military assistance program, and the construction of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline have frequently strained Tbilisi's relations with Moscow. Georgia's decision to boost its presence in the coalition forces in Iraq was an important initiative.[133]
+Georgia is currently working to become a full member of NATO. In August 2004, the Individual Partnership Action Plan of Georgia was submitted officially to NATO. On 29 October 2004, the North Atlantic Council of NATO approved the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) of Georgia, and Georgia moved on to the second stage of Euro–Atlantic Integration. In 2005, by the decision of the President of Georgia, a state commission was set up to implement the Individual Partnership Action Plan, which presents an interdepartmental group headed by the Prime Minister. The commission was tasked with coordinating and controlling the implementation of the Individual Partnership Action Plan.[citation needed]
+On 14 February 2005, the agreement on the appointment of Partnership for Peace (PfP) liaison officer between Georgia and NATO came into force, whereby a liaison officer for the South Caucasus was assigned to Georgia. On 2 March 2005, the agreement was signed on the provision of the host nation support to and transit of NATO forces and NATO personnel. On 6–9 March 2006, the IPAP implementation interim assessment team arrived in Tbilisi. On 13 April 2006, the discussion of the assessment report on implementation of the Individual Partnership Action Plan was held at NATO Headquarters, within 26+1 format.[134] In 2006, the Georgian parliament voted unanimously for the bill which calls for integration of Georgia into NATO.[citation needed] The majority of Georgians and politicians in Georgia support the push for NATO membership.[135]
+In September 2019, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that "NATO approaching our borders is a threat to Russia."[136] He was quoted as saying that if NATO accepts Georgian membership with the article on collective defense covering only Tbilisi-administered territory (i.e., excluding the Georgian territories Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are currently Russian-supported unrecognized breakaway republics), "we will not start a war, but such conduct will undermine our relations with NATO and with countries who are eager to enter the alliance."[137]
+George W. Bush became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country.[138] The street leading to Tbilisi International Airport has since been dubbed George W. Bush Avenue.[139] On 2 October 2006, Georgia and the European Union signed a joint statement on the agreed text of the Georgia–European Union Action Plan within the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). The Action Plan was formally approved at the EU–Georgia Cooperation Council session on 14 November 2006, in Brussels.[140] In June 2014, the EU and Georgia signed an Association Agreement, which entered into force on 1 July 2016.[141] On 13 December 2016, EU and Georgia reached the agreement on visa liberalisation for Georgian citizens.[142] On 27 February 2017, the Council adopted a regulation on visa liberalisation for Georgians travelling to the EU for a period of stay of 90 days in any 180-day period.[143]
+Georgia's military is organized into land and air forces. They are collectively known as the Georgian Armed Forces (GAF).[144] The mission and functions of the GAF are based on the Constitution of Georgia, Georgia's Law on Defense and National Military Strategy, and international agreements to which Georgia is signatory. They are performed under the guidance and authority of the Ministry of Defense.[citation needed] The military budget of Georgia for 2017 is 748₾ million, by 78₾ million more than in 2016. The biggest part, 62.5% of the military budget is allocated for maintaining armored forces readiness and potency development.[145] After its independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia began to develop its own military industry. The first exhibition of products made by STC Delta was in 1999.[146] STC Delta now produces a variety of military equipment, including armored vehicles, artillery systems, aviation systems, personal protection equipment, and small arms.[147]
+During later periods of the Iraq War Georgia had up to 2,000 soldiers serving in the Multi-National Force.[148] Georgia also participated in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. With 1,560 troops in 2013, it was at that time the largest non-NATO[149] and the largest per capita[150][151] troop contributor. Over 11,000 Georgian soldiers have been rotated through Afghanistan.[152] As of 2015[update], 31 Georgian servicemen have died in Afghanistan,[153] most during the Helmand campaign, and 435 were wounded, including 35 amputees.[154][155]
+In Georgia, law enforcement is conducted and provided for by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia. In recent years, the Patrol Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia has undergone a radical transformation, with the police having now absorbed a great many duties previously performed by dedicated independent government agencies. New duties performed by the police include border security and customs functions and contracted security provision; the latter function is performed by the dedicated 'security police'. Intelligence collecting in the interests of national security is now the remit of the Georgian Intelligence Service.[citation needed]
+In 2005, President Mikheil Saakashvili fired the entire traffic police force (numbering around 30,000 police officers) of the Georgian National Police due to corruption.[156][157] A new force was then subsequently built around new recruits.[156] The US State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law-Enforcement Affairs has provided assistance to the training efforts and continues to act in an advisory capacity.[158]
+The new Patruli force was first introduced in the summer of 2005 to replace the traffic police, a force which was accused of widespread corruption.[159] The police introduced an 022 (currently 112) emergency dispatch service in 2004.[160]
+Human rights in Georgia are guaranteed by the country's constitution. There is an independent human rights public defender elected by the Parliament of Georgia to ensure such rights are enforced.[161] Georgia has ratified the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in 2005. NGO "Tolerance", in its alternative report about its implementation, speaks of a rapid decrease in the number of Azerbaijani schools and cases of appointing headmasters to Azerbaijani schools who do not speak the Azerbaijani language.[162]
+The government came under criticism for its alleged use of excessive force on 26 May 2011 when it dispersed protesters led by Nino Burjanadze, among others, with tear gas and rubber bullets after they refused to clear Rustaveli avenue for an independence day parade despite the expiration of their demonstration permit and despite being offered to choose an alternative venue.[163][164][165][166] While human rights activists maintained that the protests were peaceful, the government pointed out that many protesters were masked and armed with heavy sticks and molotov cocktails.[167] Georgian opposition leader Nino Burjanadze said the accusations of planning a coup were baseless, and that the protesters' actions were legitimate.[166][168]
+Georgia is divided into 9 regions, 1 city, and 2 autonomous republics.[144] These in turn are subdivided into 67 districts and 12 self-governing cities.[169]
+Georgia contains two official autonomous regions, of which one has declared independence. Officially autonomous within Georgia,[170] the de facto independent region of Abkhazia declared independence in 1999.[171] In addition, another territory not officially autonomous has also declared independence. South Ossetia is officially known by Georgia as the Tskinvali region, as it views "South Ossetia" as implying political bonds with Russian North Ossetia.[172] It was called South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast when Georgia was part of Soviet Union. Its autonomous status was revoked in 1990. De facto separate since Georgian independence, offers were made to give South Ossetia autonomy again, but in 2006 an unrecognised referendum in the area resulted in a vote for independence.[172]
+In both Abkhazia and South Ossetia large numbers of people had been given Russian passports, some through a process of forced passportization by Russian authorities.[173] This was used as a justification for Russian invasion of Georgia during the 2008 South Ossetia war after which Russia recognised the region's independence.[174] Georgia considers the regions as occupied by Russia.[114][175] Both republics have received minimal international recognition.
+Adjara under local strongman Aslan Abashidze maintained close ties with Russia and allowed a Russian military base to be maintained in Batumi. Upon the election of Mikheil Saakashvili in 2004 tensions rose between Abashidze and the Georgian government, leading to demonstrations in Adjara and the resignation and flight of Abashidze. The region retains autonomy, and as a sign of Ajaria's reconnection with the central Georgian government, the Georgian Constitutional Court was moved from T'bilisi to Batumi.[176]
+Georgia is mostly situated in the South Caucasus, while parts of the country are also located in the North Caucasus.[177][178] The country lies between latitudes 41° and 44° N, and longitudes 40° and 47° E, with an area of 67,900 km2 (26,216 sq mi). It is a very mountainous country. The Likhi Range divides the country into eastern and western halves.[179] Historically, the western portion of Georgia was known as Colchis while the eastern plateau was called Iberia. Because of a complex geographic setting, mountains also isolate the northern region of Svaneti from the rest of Georgia.[citation needed]
+The Greater Caucasus Mountain Range forms the northern border of Georgia.[179] The main roads through the mountain range into Russian territory lead through the Roki Tunnel between Shida Kartli and North Ossetia and the Darial Gorge (in the Georgian region of Khevi). The Roki Tunnel was vital for the Russian military in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War because it is the only direct route through the Caucasus Mountains. The southern portion of the country is bounded by the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.[179] The Greater Caucasus Mountain Range is much higher in elevation than the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, with the highest peaks rising more than 5,000 meters (16,404 ft) above sea level.
+The highest mountain in Georgia is Mount Shkhara at 5,068 meters (16,627 ft), and the second highest is Mount Janga (Dzhangi–Tau) at 5,059 m (16,598 ft) above sea level. Other prominent peaks include Mount Kazbek at 5,047 m (16,558 ft), Shota Rustaveli 4,860 m (15,945 ft), Tetnuldi 4,858 m (15,938 ft), Mt. Ushba 4,700 m (15,420 ft), and Ailama 4,547 m (14,918 ft).[179] Out of the abovementioned peaks, only Kazbek is of volcanic origin. The region between Kazbek and Shkhara (a distance of about 200 km (124 mi) along the Main Caucasus Range) is dominated by numerous glaciers. Out of the 2,100 glaciers that exist in the Caucasus today, approximately 30% are located within Georgia.[citation needed]
+The term Lesser Caucasus Mountains is often used to describe the mountainous (highland) areas of southern Georgia that are connected to the Greater Caucasus Mountain Range by the Likhi Range.[179] The area can be split into two separate sub-regions; the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, which run parallel to the Greater Caucasus Range, and the Southern Georgia Volcanic Highland, which lies immediately to the south of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.[citation needed]
+The overall region can be characterized as being made up of various, interconnected mountain ranges (largely of volcanic origin) and plateaus that do not exceed 3,400 meters (11,155 ft) in elevation. Prominent features of the area include the Javakheti Volcanic Plateau, lakes, including Tabatskuri and Paravani, as well as mineral water and hot springs. Two major rivers in Georgia are the Rioni and the Mtkvari. The Southern Georgia Volcanic Highland is a young and unstable geologic region with high seismic activity and has experienced some of the most significant earthquakes that have been recorded in Georgia.[citation needed]
+The Krubera Cave is the deepest known cave in the world. It is located in the Arabika Massif of the Gagra Range, in Abkhazia. In 2001, a Russian–Ukrainian team had set the world depth record for a cave at 1,710 meters (5,610 ft). In 2004, the penetrated depth was increased on each of three expeditions, when a Ukrainian team crossed the 2,000-meter (6,562 ft) mark for the first time in the history of speleology. In October 2005, an unexplored part was found by the CAVEX team, further increasing the known depth of the cave. This expedition confirmed the known depth of the cave at 2,140 meters (7,021 ft).[citation needed]
+The landscape within the nation's boundaries is quite varied. Western Georgia's landscape ranges from low-land marsh-forests, swamps, and temperate rainforests to eternal snows and glaciers, while the eastern part of the country even contains a small segment of semi-arid plains. Forests cover around 40% of Georgia's territory while the alpine/subalpine zone accounts for roughly around 10 percent of the land.[citation needed]
+Much of the natural habitat in the low-lying areas of western Georgia has disappeared during the past 100 years because of the agricultural development of the land and urbanization. The large majority of the forests that covered the Colchis plain are now virtually non-existent with the exception of the regions that are included in the national parks and reserves (e.g. Lake Paliastomi area). At present, the forest cover generally remains outside of the low-lying areas and is mainly located along the foothills and the mountains. Western Georgia's forests consist mainly of deciduous trees below 600 meters (1,969 ft) above sea level and contain species such as oak, hornbeam, beech, elm, ash, and chestnut. Evergreen species such as box may also be found in many areas. Ca. 1000 of all 4000 higher plants of Georgia are endemic to this country.[180]
+The west-central slopes of the Meskheti Range in Ajaria as well as several locations in Samegrelo and Abkhazia are covered by temperate rain forests. Between 600–1,000 metres (1,969–3,281 ft) above sea level, the deciduous forest becomes mixed with both broad-leaf and coniferous species making up the plant life. The zone is made up mainly of beech, spruce, and fir forests. From 1,500–1,800 metres (4,921–5,906 ft), the forest becomes largely coniferous. The tree line generally ends at around 1,800 metres (5,906 ft) and the alpine zone takes over, which in most areas, extends up to an elevation of 3,000 metres (9,843 ft) above sea level. The eternal snow and glacier zone lies above the 3,000-metre line.[citation needed]
+Eastern Georgia's landscape (referring to the territory east of the Likhi Range) is considerably different from that of the west, although, much like the Colchis plain in the west, nearly all of the low-lying areas of eastern Georgia including the Mtkvari and Alazani River plains have been deforested for agricultural purposes. In addition, because of the region's relatively drier climate, some of the low-lying plains (especially in Kartli and south-eastern Kakheti) were never covered by forests in the first place.[citation needed]
+The general landscape of eastern Georgia comprises numerous valleys and gorges that are separated by mountains. In contrast with western Georgia, nearly 85 percent of the forests of the region are deciduous. Coniferous forests only dominate in the Borjomi Gorge and in the extreme western areas. Out of the deciduous species of trees, beech, oak, and hornbeam dominate. Other deciduous species include several varieties of maple, aspen, ash, and hazelnut. The Upper Alazani River Valley contains yew forests.[citation needed]
+At higher elevations above 1,000 metres (3,281 ft) above sea level (particularly in the Tusheti, Khevsureti, and Khevi regions), pine and birch forests dominate. In general, the forests in eastern Georgia occur between 500–2,000 metres (1,640–6,562 ft) above sea level, with the alpine zone extending from 2,000–2,300 to 3,000–3,500 metres (6,562–7,546 to 9,843–11,483 ft). The only remaining large, low-land forests remain in the Alazani Valley of Kakheti. The eternal snow and glacier zone lies above the 3,500-metre (11,483 ft) line in most areas of eastern Georgia.[citation needed]
+The climate of Georgia is extremely diverse, considering the nation's small size. There are two main climatic zones, roughly corresponding to the eastern and western parts of the country. The Greater Caucasus Mountain Range plays an important role in moderating Georgia's climate and protects the nation from the penetration of colder air masses from the north. The Lesser Caucasus Mountains partially protect the region from the influence of dry and hot air masses from the south.[citation needed]
+Much of western Georgia lies within the northern periphery of the humid subtropical zone with annual precipitation ranging from 1,000–4,000 mm (39.4–157.5 in). The precipitation tends to be uniformly distributed throughout the year, although the rainfall can be particularly heavy during the Autumn months. The climate of the region varies significantly with elevation and while much of the lowland areas of western Georgia are relatively warm throughout the year, the foothills and mountainous areas (including both the Greater and Lesser Caucasus Mountains) experience cool, wet summers and snowy winters (snow cover often exceeds 2 meters in many regions). Ajaria is the wettest region of the Caucasus, where the Mt. Mtirala rainforest, east of Kobuleti, receives around 4,500 mm (177.2 in) of precipitation per year.[citation needed]
+Eastern Georgia has a transitional climate from humid subtropical to continental. The region's weather patterns are influenced both by dry Caspian air masses from the east and humid Black Sea air masses from the west. The penetration of humid air masses from the Black Sea is often blocked by mountain ranges (Likhi and Meskheti) that separate the eastern and western parts of the nation. Annual precipitation is considerably less than that of western Georgia and ranges from 400–1,600 mm (15.7–63.0 in).[citation needed]
+The wettest periods generally occur during spring and autumn, while winter and summer months tend to be the driest. Much of eastern Georgia experiences hot summers (especially in the low-lying areas) and relatively cold winters. As in the western parts of the nation, elevation plays an important role in eastern Georgia where climatic conditions above 1,500 metres (4,921 ft) are considerably colder than in the low-lying areas. The regions that lie above 2,000 metres (6,562 ft) frequently experience frost even during the summer months.[citation needed]
+Because of its high landscape diversity and low latitude, Georgia is home to about 5,601 species of animals, including 648 species of vertebrates (more than 1% of the species found worldwide) and many of these species are endemics.[181] A number of large carnivores live in the forests, namely Brown bears, wolves, lynxes and Caucasian Leopards. The common pheasant (also known as the Colchian Pheasant) is an endemic bird of Georgia which has been widely introduced throughout the rest of the world as an important game bird. The species number of invertebrates is considered to be very high but data is distributed across a high number of publications. The spider checklist of Georgia, for example, includes 501 species.[182] The Rioni River may contain a breeding population of the critically endangered bastard sturgeon.[183]
+Slightly more than 6,500 species of fungi, including lichen-forming species, have been recorded from Georgia,[184][185] but this number is far from complete. The true total number of fungal species occurring in Georgia, including species not yet recorded, is likely to be far higher, given the generally accepted estimate that only about seven percent of all fungi worldwide have so far been discovered.[186] Although the amount of available information is still very small, a first effort has been made to estimate the number of fungal species endemic to Georgia, and 2,595 species have been tentatively identified as possible endemics of the country.[187] 1,729 species of plants have been recorded from Georgia in association with fungi.[185] According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are 4,300 species of vascular plants in Georgia.[188]
+Archaeological research demonstrates that Georgia has been involved in commerce with many lands and empires since ancient times, largely due its location on the Black Sea and later on the historical Silk Road. Gold, silver, copper and iron have been mined in the Caucasus Mountains. Georgian wine making is a very old tradition and a key branch of the country's economy. The country has sizable hydropower resources.[189] Throughout Georgia's modern history agriculture and tourism have been principal economic sectors, because of the country's climate and topography.[144]
+For much of the 20th century, Georgia's economy was within the Soviet model of command economy. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Georgia embarked on a major structural reform designed to transition to a free market economy. As with all other post-Soviet states, Georgia faced a severe economic collapse. The civil war and military conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia aggravated the crisis. The agriculture and industry output diminished. By 1994 the gross domestic product had shrunk to a quarter of that of 1989.[190] The first financial help from the West came in 1995, when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund granted Georgia a credit of US$206 million and Germany granted DM 50 million.[citation needed]
+Since the early 21st century visible positive developments have been observed in the economy of Georgia. In 2007, Georgia's real GDP growth rate reached 12 percent, making Georgia one of the fastest-growing economies in Eastern Europe.[144] The World Bank dubbed Georgia "the number one economic reformer in the world" because it has in one year improved from rank 112th to 18th in terms of ease of doing business.[191] Georgia improved its position to 6th in World Bank's Doing Business report 2019.[192] The country has a high unemployment rate of 12.6% and has fairly low median income compared to European countries.[citation needed]
+The 2006 ban on imports of Georgian wine to Russia, one of Georgia's biggest trading partners, and break of financial links was described by the IMF Mission as an "external shock".[193] In addition, Russia increased the price of gas for Georgia. Around the same time, the National Bank of Georgia stated that ongoing inflation in the country was mainly triggered by external reasons, including Russia's economic embargo.[194] The Georgian authorities expected that the current account deficit due to the embargo in 2007 would be financed by "higher foreign exchange proceeds generated by the large inflow of foreign direct investment" and an increase in tourist revenues.[195] The country has also maintained a solid credit in international market securities.[196] Georgia is becoming more integrated into the global trading network: its 2015 imports and exports account for 50% and 21% of GDP respectively.[144] Georgia's main imports are fuels, vehicles, machinery and parts, grain and other foods, pharmaceuticals. Main exports are vehicles, ferro-alloys, fertilizers, nuts, scrap metal, gold, copper ores.[144]
+Georgia is developing into an international transport corridor through Batumi and Poti ports, Baku–Tbilisi–Kars Railway line, an oil pipeline from Baku through Tbilisi to Ceyhan, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) and a parallel gas pipeline, the South Caucasus Pipeline.[197]
+Since coming to power the Saakashvili administration accomplished a series of reforms aimed at improving tax collection. Among other things a flat income tax was introduced in 2004.[198] As a result, budget revenues have increased fourfold and a once large budget deficit has turned into a surplus.[199][144][200]
+As of 2001, 54 percent of the population lived below the national poverty line but by 2006 poverty decreased to 34 percent, by 2015 it is 10.1 percent.[201] In 2015, the average monthly income of a household was 1,022.3₾ (about $426).[202] 2015 calculations place Georgia's nominal GDP at US$13.98 billion.[203] Georgia's economy is becoming more devoted to services (as of 2016[update], representing 68.3 percent of GDP), moving away from the agricultural sector (9.2 percent).[144]
+In regards to telecommunication infrastructure, Georgia is ranked the last among its bordering neighbors in the World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index (NRI) – an indicator for determining the development level of a country's information and communication technologies. Georgia ranked number 58 overall in the 2016 NRI ranking,[204] up from 60 in 2015.[205]
+Tourism is an increasingly significant part of the Georgian economy. In 2016, 2,714,773 tourists brought approximately US$2.16 billion to the country.[206] According to the government, there are 103 resorts in different climatic zones in Georgia. Tourist attractions include more than 2,000 mineral springs, over 12,000 historical and cultural monuments, four of which are recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Bagrati Cathedral in Kutaisi and Gelati Monastery, historical monuments of Mtskheta, and Upper Svaneti).[207] In 2018, more than 1.4 million tourists from Russia visited Georgia.[208]
+Today transport in Georgia is provided by rail, road, ferry, and air. Total length of roads excluding occupied territories is 20,553 kilometers and railways – 1,576 km.[209] Positioned in the Caucasus and on the coast of the Black Sea, Georgia is a key country through which energy imports to the European Union from neighbouring Azerbaijan pass. Traditionally, the country was located on an important north–south trade route between European Russia and the Near East and Turkey.[citation needed]
+In recent years Georgia has invested large amounts of money in the modernization of its transport networks. The construction of new highways has been prioritized and, as such, major cities like Tbilisi have seen the quality of their roads improve dramatically; despite this however, the quality of inter-city routes remains poor and to date only one motorway-standard road has been constructed – the ს 1.[210]
+The Georgian railways represent an important transport artery for the Caucasus, as they make up the largest proportion of a route linking the Black and Caspian Seas. In turn, this has allowed them to benefit in recent years from increased energy exports from neighbouring Azerbaijan to the European Union, Ukraine, and Turkey.[211] Passenger services are operated by the state-owned Georgian Railway whilst freight operations are carried out by a number of licensed operators. Since 2004 the Georgian Railways have been undergoing a rolling program of fleet-renewal and managerial restructuring which is aimed at making the service provided more efficient and comfortable for passengers.[212] Infrastructural development has also been high on the agenda for the railways, with the key Tbilisi railway junction expected to undergo major reorganisation in the near future.[213] Additional projects also include the construction of the economically important Kars–Tbilisi–Baku railway, which was opened on 30 October 2017 and connects much of the Caucasus with Turkey by standard gauge railway.[214][215]
+Air and maritime transport is developing in Georgia, with the former mainly used by passengers and the latter for transport of freight. Georgia currently has four international airports, the largest of which is by far Tbilisi International Airport, hub for Georgian Airways, which offers connections to many large European cities. Other airports in the country are largely underdeveloped or lack scheduled traffic, although, as of late, efforts have been made to solve both these problems.[216] There are a number of seaports along Georgia's Black Sea coast, the largest and most busy of which is the Port of Batumi; whilst the town is itself a seaside resort, the port is a major cargo terminal in the Caucasus and is often used by neighbouring Azerbaijan as a transit point for making energy deliveries to Europe. Scheduled and chartered passenger ferry services link Georgia with Bulgaria,[217] Romania, Turkey and Ukraine.[218]
+Like most native Caucasian peoples, the Georgians do not fit into any of the main ethnic categories of Europe or Asia. The Georgian language, the most pervasive of the Kartvelian languages, is not Indo-European, Turkic, or Semitic. The present day Georgian or Kartvelian nation is thought to have resulted from the fusion of aboriginal, autochthonous inhabitants with immigrants who moved into South Caucasus from the direction of Anatolia in remote antiquity.[219]
+Ethnic Georgians form about 86.8 percent of Georgia's current population of 3,713,804 (2014 census).[221][n 1] Other ethnic groups include Abkhazians, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, Greeks, Jews, Kists, Ossetians, Russians, Ukrainians, Yezidis and others.[221][n 1] The Georgian Jews are one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Once Georgia was also home to significant ethnic German communities, but most Germans were deported during World War II.[222]
+The 1989 census recorded 341,000 ethnic Russians, or 6.3 percent of the population,[223] 52,000 Ukrainians and 100,000 Greeks in Georgia.[224] Since 1990, 1.5 million Georgian nationals have left.[224] At least 1 million emigrants from Georgia legally or illegally reside in Russia.[225] Georgia's net migration rate is −4.54, excluding Georgian nationals who live abroad.[citation needed] Georgia has nonetheless been inhabited by immigrants from all over the world throughout its independence. According to 2014 statistics, Georgia gets most of its immigrants from Russia (51.6%), Greece (8.3%), Ukraine (8.11%), Germany (4.3%), and Armenia (3.8%).[226][n 1]
+In the early 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, violent separatist conflicts broke out in the autonomous region of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region. Many Ossetians living in Georgia left the country, mainly to Russia's North Ossetia.[227] On the other hand, more than 150,000 Georgians left Abkhazia after the breakout of hostilities in 1993.[228] Of the Meskhetian Turks who were forcibly relocated in 1944 only a tiny fraction returned to Georgia as of 2008[update].[229]
+The most widespread language group is the Kartvelian family, which includes Georgian, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz.[230][231][232][233][234][235] The official languages of Georgia are Georgian, with Abkhaz having official status within the autonomous region of Abkhazia. Georgian is the primary language of 87.7 percent of the population, followed by 6.2 percent speaking Azerbaijani, 3.9 percent Armenian, 1.2 percent Russian, and 1 percent other languages.[236][n 1] In the 2010, the United States federal government began the Teach and Learn English with Georgia program of promoting English literacy in elementary school. The goal was to import English speakers from across the world to ensure that all children in Georgia spoke English in four years and replace Russian as a second language.[237]
+Today 83.4 percent of the population practices Eastern Orthodox Christianity, with the majority of these adhering to the national Georgian Orthodox Church.[239][n 1] The Georgian Orthodox Church is one of the world's most ancient Christian Churches, and claims apostolic foundation by Saint Andrew.[240] In the first half of the 4th century, Christianity was adopted as the state religion of Iberia (present-day Kartli, or eastern Georgia), following the missionary work of Saint Nino of Cappadocia.[241][242] The Church gained autocephaly during the early Middle Ages; it was abolished during the Russian domination of the country, restored in 1917 and fully recognised by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1989.[243]
+The special status of the Georgian Orthodox Church is officially recognised in the Constitution of Georgia and the Concordat of 2002, although religious institutions are separate from the state, and every citizen has the right of religion.[citation needed]
+[n 1]
+Main religions (2014)[9]
+Religious minorities of Georgia include Muslims (10.7 percent), Armenian Christians (2.9 percent) and Roman Catholics (0.5 percent).[239][n 1] 0.7 percent of those recorded in the 2014 census declared themselves to be adherents of other religions, 1.2 percent refused or did not state their religion and 0.5 percent declared no religion at all.[239]
+Islam is represented by both Azerbaijani Shia Muslims (in the south-east) ethnic Georgian Sunni Muslims in Adjara, and Laz-speaking Sunni Muslims as well as Sunni Meskhetian Turks along the border with Turkey. In Abkhazia, a minority of the Abkhaz population is also Sunni Muslim, alongside the faithful of the revived Abkhaz pagan faith. There are also smaller communities of Greek Muslims (of Pontic Greek origin) and Armenian Muslims, both of whom are descended from Ottoman-era converts to Turkish Islam from Eastern Anatolia who settled in Georgia following the Lala Mustafa Pasha's Caucasian campaign that led to the Ottoman conquest of the country in 1578. Georgian Jews trace the history of their community to the 6th century BC; their numbers have dwindled in the last decades due to high levels of immigration to Israel.[244]
+Despite the long history of religious harmony in Georgia,[245] there have been instances of religious discrimination and violence against "nontraditional faiths", such as Jehovah's Witnesses, by followers of the defrocked Orthodox priest Basil Mkalavishvili.[246]
+In addition to traditional religious organizations, Georgia retains secular and irreligious segments of society (0.5 percent),[247] as well as a significant portion of religiously affiliated individuals who do not actively practice their faith.[248]
+The education system of Georgia has undergone sweeping modernizing, although controversial, reforms since 2004.[249][250] Education in Georgia is mandatory for all children aged 6–14.[251] The school system is divided into elementary (six years; age level 6–12), basic (three years; age level 12–15), and secondary (three years; age level 15–18), or alternatively vocational studies (two years). Students with a secondary school certificate have access to higher education. Only the students who have passed the Unified National Examinations may enroll in a state-accredited higher education institution, based on ranking of the scores received at the exams.[252]
+Most of these institutions offer three levels of study: a Bachelor's Program (three to four years); a Master's Program (two years), and a Doctoral Program (three years). There is also a Certified Specialist's Program that represents a single-level higher education program lasting from three to six years.[251][253] As of 2016[update], 75 higher education institutions are accredited by the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia.[254] Gross primary enrollment ratio was 117 percent for the period of 2012–2014, the 2nd highest in Europe after Sweden.[255]
+Tbilisi has become the main artery of the Georgian educational system, particularly since the creation of the First Georgian Republic in 1918 permitted the establishment of modern, Georgian-language educational institutions. Tbilisi is the home to several major institutions of higher education in Georgia, notably the Tbilisi State Medical University, which was founded as Tbilisi Medical Institute in 1918, and the Tbilisi State University (TSU), which was established in 1918 and remains the oldest university in the entire Caucasus region.[256] With enrollment of over 35,000 students, the number of faculty and staff (collaborators) at TSU is approximately 5,000. Georgia's main and largest technical university, Georgian Technical University,[257] as well as The University of Georgia (Tbilisi),[258] Caucasus University[259] and Free University of Tbilisi[260] are also in Tbilisi.
+Georgian culture evolved over thousands of years from its foundations in the Iberian and Colchian civilizations.[261] Georgian culture enjoyed a renaissance and golden age of classical literature, arts, philosophy, architecture and science in the 11th century.[262] Georgian culture was influenced by Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the various Iranian empires (notably the Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanian, Safavid and Qajar empires),[263][264][265][266] and later, from the 19th century, by the Russian Empire.
+The Georgian language, and the Classical Georgian literature of the poet Shota Rustaveli, were revived in the 19th century after a long period of turmoil, laying the foundations of the romantics and novelists of the modern era such as Grigol Orbeliani, Nikoloz Baratashvili, Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Vazha-Pshavela.[267] The Georgian language is written in three unique scripts, which according to traditional accounts were invented by King Pharnavaz I of Iberia in the 3rd century BC.[268][269]
+Georgia is known for its folklore, traditional music, dances, theatre, cinema, and art. Notable painters from the 20th century include Niko Pirosmani, Lado Gudiashvili, Elene Akhvlediani; notable ballet choreographers include George Balanchine, Vakhtang Chabukiani, and Nino Ananiashvili; notable poets include Galaktion Tabidze, Lado Asatiani, and Mukhran Machavariani; and notable theatre and film directors include Robert Sturua, Tengiz Abuladze, Giorgi Danelia and Otar Ioseliani.[267]
+Georgian architecture has been influenced by many civilizations. There are several different architectural styles for castles, towers, fortifications and churches. The Upper Svaneti fortifications, and the castle town of Shatili in Khevsureti, are some of the finest examples of medieval Georgian castle architecture. Other architectural aspects of Georgia include Rustaveli avenue in Tbilisi in the Haussmann style, and the Old Town District.[citation needed]
+Georgian ecclesiastic art is one of the most notable aspects of Georgian Christian architecture, which combines the classical dome style with the original basilica style, forming what is known as the Georgian cross-dome style. Cross-dome architecture developed in Georgia during the 9th century; before that, most Georgian churches were basilicas. Other examples of Georgian ecclesiastic architecture can be found outside Georgia: Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria (built in 1083 by the Georgian military commander Grigorii Bakuriani), Iviron monastery in Greece (built by Georgians in the 10th century), and the Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem (built by Georgians in the 9th century). One of the most famous late 19th/early 20th century Georgian artists was primitivist painter Niko Pirosmani.[270]
+Television, magazines, and newspapers in Georgia are all operated by both state-owned and for-profit corporations which depend on advertising, subscription, and other sales-related revenues. The Constitution of Georgia guarantees freedom of speech. As a country in transition, the Georgian media system is under transformation.[citation needed]
+The media environment of Georgia remains the freest and most diverse in the South Caucasus,[271] despite the long-term politicisation and polarisation affecting the sector. The political struggle for control over the public broadcaster have left it without a direction in 2014 too.[272]
+A large percentage of Georgian households have a television, and most have at least one radio. Most of Georgia's media companies are headquartered in its capital and largest city, Tbilisi.[citation needed]
+Georgia has an ancient musical tradition, which is primarily known for its early development of polyphony. Georgian polyphony is based on three vocal parts, a unique tuning system based on perfect fifths, and a harmonic structure rich in parallel fifths and dissonances.[citation needed] Three types of polyphony have developed in Georgia: a complex version in Svaneti, a dialogue over a bass background in the Kakheti region, and a three-part partially-improvised version in western Georgia.[273] The Georgian folk song "Chakrulo" was one of 27 musical compositions included on the Voyager Golden Records that were sent into space on Voyager 2 on 20 August 1977.[274]
+Georgian cuisine and wine have evolved through the centuries, adapting traditions in each era. One of the most unusual traditions of dining is supra, or Georgian table, which is also a way of socialising with friends and family. The head of supra is known as tamada. He also conducts the highly philosophical toasts, and makes sure that everyone is enjoying themselves. Various historical regions of Georgia are known for their particular dishes: for example, khinkali (meat dumplings), from eastern mountainous Georgia, and khachapuri, mainly from Imereti, Samegrelo and Adjara. In addition to traditional Georgian dishes, the foods of other countries have been brought to Georgia by immigrants from Russia, Greece, and recently China.[citation needed]
+The most popular sports in Georgia are football, basketball, rugby union, wrestling, judo, and weightlifting. Historically, Georgia has been famous for its physical education; the Romans were fascinated with Georgians' physical qualities after seeing the training techniques of ancient Iberia.[275] Wrestling remains a historically important sport of Georgia, and some historians think that the Greco-Roman style of wrestling incorporates many Georgian elements.[276]
+Within Georgia, one of the most popularized styles of wrestling is the Kakhetian style. There were a number of other styles in the past that are not as widely used today. For example, the Khevsureti region of Georgia has three different styles of wrestling. Other popular sports in 19th century Georgia were polo, and Lelo, a traditional Georgian game later replaced by rugby union.[citation needed]
+The first and only race circuit in the Caucasian region is located in Georgia. Rustavi International Motorpark originally built in 1978 was re-opened in 2012 after total reconstruction[277] costing $20 million. The track satisfies the FIA Grade 2 requirements and currently hosts the Legends car racing series and Formula Alfa competitions.[278]
+Basketball was always one of the notable sports in Georgia, and Georgia had a few very famous Soviet Union national team members, such as Otar Korkia, Mikheil Korkia, Zurab Sakandelidze and Levan Moseshvili. Dinamo Tbilisi won the prestigious Euroleague competition in 1962. Georgia had five players in the NBA: Vladimir Stepania, Jake Tsakalidis, Nikoloz Tskitishvili, Tornike Shengelia and current Golden State Warriors center Zaza Pachulia. Other notable basketball players are two times Euroleague champion Giorgi Shermadini and Euroleague players Manuchar Markoishvili and Viktor Sanikidze. Sport is regaining its popularity in the country in recent years. Georgia national basketball team qualified to EuroBasket during the last three tournaments since 2011.[citation needed]
+The following are links to the international rankings of Georgia.

en/2195.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

+Georgia (/ˈdʒɔːrdʒə/) is a state in the Southeastern Region of the United States. Georgia is the 24th-largest in area and 8th most populous of the 50 United States. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, and to the west by Alabama. Its 2019 estimated population was 10,617,423, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.[4] Atlanta, a "beta(+)" global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with an estimated population of more than 6 million people in 2019,[5] is the 9th most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population.
+Founded in 1733 as a British colony, Georgia was the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established.[6] Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Colony of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.[7] From 1802 to 1804, western Georgia was split to form the Mississippi Territory, which later was admitted as the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, and was one of the original seven Confederate States.[7] Following the Civil War, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870.[7] In the post-Reconstruction era, Georgia's economy was transformed as a group of prominent politicians, businessmen, and journalists, led by Henry W. Grady, espoused the "New South" philosophy of sectional reconciliation, industrialization, and white supremacy.[8] During the 20th century, several Georgians, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., were prominent leaders during the civil rights movement.[7] Since 1945, Georgia has seen substantial population growth as part of the broader Sun Belt phenomenon. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing.[9]
+Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna. The state's northernmost regions include the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the larger Appalachian Mountain system. The Piedmont plateau extends from the foothills of the Blue Ridge south to the Fall Line, an escarpment to the coastal plain defining the state's southern region. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet (1,458 m) above sea level; the lowest is the Atlantic Ocean. With the exception of some high-altitude areas in the Blue Ridge, the entirety of the state has a humid subtropical climate. Of the states entirely east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area.[10]
+Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures. The British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733.[11] The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by (and named for) King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king.[12]
+The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778,[13] and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.
+In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
+In early 1861, Georgia joined the Confederacy (with secessionists having a slight majority of delegates)[14] and became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service, roughly one of every five who served.[15] In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union.
+With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering.[16] In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude blacks from politics.[17] They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration.[18] According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States (1877-1950), Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male.[19] Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
+An Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South.
+On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.[20]
+By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some in-migration by whites.[21] With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a noted civil rights leader, was elected to the state House in 1965, and served multiple terms there and in the state senate.
+Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration to ensure the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, earned admiration by writing in support of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1970, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972 Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since Reconstruction.
+In 1980, construction was completed on an expansion of what is now named Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). The busiest and most efficient airport in the world, it accommodates more than a hundred million passengers annually.[22] Employing more than 60,000 people, the airport became a major engine for economic growth.[22] With the advantages of cheap real estate, low taxes, right-to-work laws and a regulatory environment limiting government interference, the Atlanta metropolitan area became a national center of finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, logistics, and transportation companies, as well as the film, convention, and trade show businesses. As a testament to the city's growing international profile, in 1990 the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of Atlanta's status as a transportation hub, in 1991 UPS established its headquarters in a suburb. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York or Chicago.
+Beginning from the Atlantic Ocean, the state's eastern border with South Carolina runs up the Savannah River, northwest to its origin at the confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers. It then continues up the Tugaloo (originally Tugalo) and into the Chattooga River, its most significant tributary. These bounds were decided in the 1797 Treaty of Beaufort, and tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in the two Georgia v. South Carolina cases in 1923 and 1989.[citation needed]
+The border then takes a sharp turn around the tip of Rabun County, at latitude 35°N, though from this point it diverges slightly south (due to inaccuracies in the original survey). This northern border was originally the Georgia and North Carolina border all the way to the Mississippi River, until Tennessee was divided from North Carolina, and the Yazoo companies induced the legislature of Georgia to pass an act, approved by the governor in 1795, to sell the greater part of Georgia's territory presently comprising Alabama and Mississippi.[23]
+The state's western border runs in a straight line south-southeastward from a point southwest of Chattanooga, to meet the Chattahoochee River near West Point. It continues downriver to the point where it joins the Flint River (the confluence of the two forming Florida's Apalachicola River); the southern border goes almost due east and very slightly south, in a straight line to the St. Mary's River, which then forms the remainder of the boundary back to the ocean.[citation needed]
+The water boundaries are still set to be the original thalweg of the rivers. Since then, several have been inundated by lakes created by dams, including the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint point now under Lake Seminole.[citation needed]
+Georgia state legislators have claimed that in an 1818 survey the state's border with Tennessee was erroneously placed one mile (1.6 km) farther south than intended, and they still dispute it. Correction of this inaccuracy would allow Georgia access to water from the Tennessee River.[24]
+Each region has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the Ridge and Valley, which lies in the northwest corner of the state, includes limestone, sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, which have yielded construction-grade limestone, barite, ocher, and small amounts of coal.
+The state of Georgia has approximately 250 tree species and 58 protected plants. Georgia's native trees include red cedar, a variety of pines, oaks, hollies, cypress, sweetgum, scaly-bark and white hickories, and sabal palmetto. East Georgia is in the subtropical coniferous forest biome and conifer species as other broadleaf evergreen flora make up the majority of the southern and coastal regions. Yellow jasmine and mountain laurel make up just a few of the flowering shrubs in the state.
+White-tailed (Virginia) deer are in nearly all counties. The northern mockingbird and brown thrasher are among the 160 bird species that live in the state.[25]
+Reptiles include the eastern diamondback, copperhead, and cottonmouth snakes as well as alligators; amphibians include salamanders, frogs and toads. There are about 79 species of reptile and 63 amphibians known to live in Georgia.[25]
+The most popular freshwater game fish are trout, bream, bass, and catfish, all but the last of which are produced in state hatcheries for restocking. Popular saltwater game fish include red drum, spotted seatrout, flounder, and tarpon. Porpoises, whales, shrimp, oysters, and blue crabs are found inshore and offshore of the Georgia coast.[25]
+The majority of the state is primarily a humid subtropical climate. Hot and humid summers are typical, except at the highest elevations. The entire state, including the North Georgia mountains, receives moderate to heavy precipitation, which varies from 45 inches (1143 mm) in central Georgia[26] to approximately 75 inches (1905 mm) around the northeast part of the state.[27] The degree to which the weather of a certain region of Georgia is subtropical depends on the latitude, its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, and the elevation. The latter factor is felt chiefly in the mountainous areas of the northern part of the state, which are farther away from the ocean and can be 4500 feet (1350 m) above sea level. The USDA plant hardiness zones for Georgia range from zone 6b (no colder than −5 °F (−21 °C) ) in the Blue Ridge Mountains to zone 8b (no colder than 15 °F (−9 °C) ) along the Atlantic coast and Florida border.[28]
+The highest temperature ever recorded is 112 °F (44.4 °C) in Louisville on July 24, 1952,[29] while the lowest is −17 °F (−27.2 °C) in northern Floyd County on January 27, 1940.[30] Georgia is one of the leading states in frequency of tornadoes, though they are rarely stronger than EF1. Although tornadoes striking the city are very rare,[31] an EF2 tornado[31] hit downtown Atlanta on March 14, 2008, causing moderate to severe damage to various buildings. With a coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, Georgia is also vulnerable to hurricanes, although direct hurricane strikes were rare during the 20th century. Georgia often is affected by hurricanes that strike the Florida Panhandle, weaken over land, and bring strong tropical storm winds and heavy rain to the interior, a recent example being Hurricane Michael,[32] as well as hurricanes that come close to the Georgia coastline, brushing the coast on their way north without ever making landfall. Hurricane Matthew of 2016 and Hurricane Dorian of 2019 did just that.
+The United States Census Bureau estimates that in 2019 Georgia had a population of 10,617,423, which was an increase of 97,948 from the previous year, and an increase of 929,770 (9.60%) since 2010.[35] This includes a natural increase since the last census of 438,939 (849,414 births minus 410,475 deaths) and an increase from net migration of 606,673 people into the state. Immigration resulted in a net increase of 228,415 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 378,258 people.
+As of 2010[update], the number of illegal immigrants living in Georgia more than doubled to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009, according to a federal report. That gave Georgia the greatest percentage increase among the 10 states with the biggest illegal immigrant populations during those years.[36] Georgia has banned sanctuary cities.[37]
+There were 743,000 veterans in 2009.[38]
+According to the 2010 United States Census, Georgia had a population of 9,687,653. In terms of race and ethnicity, the state was 59.7% White (55.9% Non-Hispanic White alone), 30.5% Black or African American, 0.3% American Indian or Alaska Native, 3.2% Asian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 4.0% from some other race, and 2.1% from two or more races. Hispanics and Latinos of any race made up 8.8% of the population.[39]
+As of 2011[update], 58.8% of Georgia's population younger than age 1 were minorities (meaning they had at least one parent who was not non-Hispanic white) compared to other states like California with 75.1%, New York with 55.6%, and Texas with 69.8%.[43]
+The largest European ancestry groups are:
+In the 1980 census 1,584,303 Georgians claimed English ancestry out of a total state population of 3,994,817, making them 40% of the state, and the largest ethnic group at the time.[46] Today, many of these same people claiming they are of "American" ancestry are actually of English descent, and some are of Scots-Irish descent; however, their families have lived in the state for so long, in many cases since the colonial period, that they choose to identify simply as having "American" ancestry or do not in fact know their own ancestry. Their ancestry primarily goes back to the original thirteen colonies and for this reason many of them today simply claim "American" ancestry, though they are of predominantly English ancestry.[47][48][49][50]
+As of 2004[update], 7.7% of Georgia's population was reported as under 5 years of age, 26.4% under 18, and 9.6% were 65 or older. Also, as of 2004[update], females made up approximately 50.6% of the population and African Americans made up approximately 29.6%.
+Historically, about half of Georgia's population was composed of African Americans who, before the Civil War, were almost exclusively enslaved. The Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the rural South to the industrial North from 1914 to 1970 reduced the African American population.[51]
+Georgia had the second-fastest-growing Asian population growth in the U.S. from 1990 to 2000, more than doubling in size during the ten-year period.[52] In addition, according to census estimates, Georgia ranks third among the states in terms of the percent of the total population that is African American (after Mississippi and Louisiana) and third in numeric Black population after New York and Florida.
+Georgia is the state with the third-lowest percentage of older people (65 or older), at 12.8 percent (as of 2015[update]).[53]
+The colonial settlement of large numbers of Scottish American, English American and Scotch-Irish Americans in the mountains and piedmont, and coastal settlement by some English Americans and African Americans, have strongly influenced the state's culture in food, language and music. The concentration of Africans imported to coastal areas in the 18th century repeatedly from rice-growing regions of West Africa led to the development of Gullah-Geechee language and culture in the Low Country among African Americans. They share a unique heritage in which African traditions of food, religion and culture were continued more than in some other areas. In the creolization of Southern culture, their foodways became an integral part of all Southern cooking in the Low Country.[54][55]
+As of 2010[update], 87.35% (7,666,663) of Georgia residents age 5 and older spoke English at home as a primary language, while 7.42% (651,583) spoke Spanish, 0.51% (44,702) Korean, 0.44% (38,244) Vietnamese, 0.42% (36,679) French, 0.38% (33,009) Chinese (which includes Mandarin), and German, which was spoken as a main language by 0.29% (23,351) of the population over the age of  5. In total, 12.65% (1,109,888) of Georgia's population age 5 and older spoke a mother language other than English.[56]
+Atlanta, located in north-central Georgia at the Eastern Continental Divide, has been Georgia's capital city since 1868. It is the most populous city in Georgia, with an estimated 2019 population of just over 506,000.[57]
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the cultural and economic center of the Southeast; its estimated population in 2019 was over 6 million, or 57% of Georgia's total. Atlanta is the nation's ninth largest metropolitan area.[58]
+The state has seventeen cities with populations above 50,000, based on 2019 U.S. Census estimates.[57]
+* In 2014, the City of Macon and most of unincorporated Bibb County officially merged. Macon joined Columbus, Augusta, Athens, Cusseta and Georgetown as consolidated city-county governments in Georgia.
+Along with the rest of the Southeast, Georgia's population continues to grow rapidly, with primary gains concentrated in urban areas. The population of the Atlanta metropolitan area added 1.23 million people (24 percent) between 2000 and 2010, and Atlanta rose in rank from the eleventh-largest metropolitan area in the United States to the ninth-largest.[59]
+The composition of religious affiliation in Georgia is 70% Protestant, 9% Catholic, 1% Mormon, 1% Jewish, 0.5% Muslim, 0.5% Buddhist, and 0.5% Hindu. Atheists, deists, agnostics, and other unaffiliated people make up 13% of the population.[60] The largest Christian denominations by number of adherents in 2010 were the Southern Baptist Convention with 1,759,317; the United Methodist Church with 619,394; and the Roman Catholic Church with 596,384. Non-denominational Evangelical Protestant had 566,782 members, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) has 175,184 members, and the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. has 172,982 members.[61] The Presbyterian Church (USA) is the largest Presbyterian body in the state, with 300 congregations and 100,000 members. The other large body, Presbyterian Church in America, had at its founding date 14 congregations and 2,800 members; in 2010 it counted 139 congregations and 32,000 members.[62][63] The Roman Catholic Church is noteworthy in Georgia's urban areas, and includes the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah. Georgia is home to the largest Hindu temple in the United States, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, located in the suburb city of Lilburn. Georgia is home to several historic synagogues including The Temple (Atlanta), Congregation Beth Jacob (Atlanta), and Congregation Mickve Israel (Savannah). Chabad and the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute are also active in the state.[64][65]
+As with all other U.S. states and the federal government, Georgia's government is based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power.[67] Executive authority in the state rests with the governor, currently Brian Kemp (Republican). Both the Governor of Georgia and lieutenant governor are elected on separate ballots to four-year terms of office. Unlike the federal government, but like many other U.S. States, most of the executive officials who comprise the governor's cabinet are elected by the citizens of Georgia rather than appointed by the governor.
+Legislative authority resides in the General Assembly, composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Lieutenant Governor presides over the Senate, while members of the House of Representatives select their own Speaker. The Georgia Constitution mandates a maximum of 56 senators, elected from single-member districts, and a minimum of 180 representatives, apportioned among representative districts (which sometimes results in more than one representative per district); there are currently 56 senators and 180 representatives. The term of office for senators and representatives is two years.[68] The laws enacted by the General Assembly are codified in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated.
+State judicial authority rests with the state Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, which have statewide authority.[69] In addition, there are smaller courts which have more limited geographical jurisdiction, including Superior Courts, State Courts, Juvenile Courts, Magistrate Courts and Probate Courts. Justices of the Supreme Court and judges of the Court of Appeals are elected statewide by the citizens in non-partisan elections to six-year terms. Judges for the smaller courts are elected to four-year terms by the state's citizens who live within that court's jurisdiction.
+Georgia consists of 159 counties, second only to Texas, with 254.[70] Georgia had 161 counties until the end of 1931, when Milton and Campbell were merged into the existing Fulton. Some counties have been named for prominent figures in both American and Georgian history, and many bear names with Native American origin. Counties in Georgia have their own elected legislative branch, usually called the Board of Commissioners, which usually also has executive authority in the county.[71] Several counties have a sole Commissioner form of government, with legislative and executive authority vested in a single person. Georgia is the only state with current Sole Commissioner counties. Georgia's Constitution provides all counties and cities with "home rule" authority. The county commissions have considerable power to pass legislation within their county, as a municipality would.
+Georgia recognizes all local units of government as cities, so every incorporated town is legally a city. Georgia does not provide for townships or independent cities, though there have been bills proposed in the Legislature to provide for townships;[72] it does allow consolidated city-county governments by local referendum. All of Georgia's second-tier cities except Savannah have now formed consolidated city-county governments by referendum: Columbus (in 1970), Athens (1990), Augusta (1995), and Macon (2012). (Augusta and Athens have excluded one or more small, incorporated towns within their consolidated boundaries; Columbus and Macon eventually absorbed all smaller incorporated entities within their consolidated boundaries.) The small town of Cusseta adopted a consolidated city-county government after it merged with unincorporated Chattahoochee County in 2003. Three years later, in 2006, the town of Georgetown consolidated with the rest of Quitman County.
+There is no true metropolitan government in Georgia, though the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) and Georgia Regional Transportation Authority do provide some services, and the ARC must approve all major land development projects in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
+Georgia has voted Republican in six consecutive presidential elections since 1996.
+Until 1964, Georgia's state government had the longest unbroken record of single-party dominance, by the Democratic Party, of any state in the Union. This record was established largely due to the disenfranchisement of most blacks and many poor whites by the state in its constitution and laws in the early 20th century. Some elements, such as requiring payment of poll taxes and passing literacy tests, prevented blacks from registering to vote; their exclusion from the political system lasted into the 1960s and reduced the Republican Party to a non-competitive status in the early 20th century.[73]
+White Democrats regained power after Reconstruction due in part to the efforts of some using intimidation and violence, but this method came into disrepute.[74] In 1900, shortly before Georgia adopted a disfranchising constitutional amendment in 1908, blacks comprised 47% of the state's population.[75]
+The whites dealt with this problem of potential political power by the 1908 amendment, which in practice disenfranchised blacks and poor whites, nearly half of the state population. It required that any male at least 21 years of age wanting to register to vote must also: (a) be of good character and able to pass a test on citizenship, (b) be able to read and write provisions of the U.S. and Georgia constitutions, or (c) own at least 40 acres of land or $500 in property. Any Georgian who had fought in any war from the American Revolution through the Spanish–American War was exempted from these additional qualifications. More importantly, any Georgian descended from a veteran of any of these wars also was exempted. Because by 1908 many white Georgia males were grandsons of veterans and/or owned the required property, the exemption and the property requirement basically allowed only well-to-do whites to vote. The qualifications of good character, citizenship knowledge, and literacy (all determined subjectively by white registrars), and property ownership were used to disqualify most blacks and poor whites, preventing them from registering to vote. The voter rolls dropped dramatically.[74][76] In the early 20th century, Progressives promoted electoral reform and reducing the power of ward bosses to clean up politics. Their additional rules, such as the eight-box law, continued to effectively close out people who were illiterate.[17] White, one-party rule was solidified.
+For more than 130 years, from 1872 to 2003, Georgians nominated and elected only white Democratic governors, and white Democrats held the majority of seats in the General Assembly.[77] Most of the Democrats elected throughout these years were Southern Democrats, who were fiscally and socially conservative by national standards.[78][79] This voting pattern continued after the segregationist period.[80]
+Legal segregation was ended by passage of federal legislation in the 1960s. According to the 1960 census, the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American was 28%; hundreds of thousands of blacks had left the state in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. New white residents arrived through migration and immigration. Following support from the national Democratic Party for the civil rights movement and especially civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, most African-American voters, as well as other minority voters, have largely supported the Democratic Party in Georgia.[81] In the decades since the late 20th century, the conservative white-majority voters have increasingly supported Republicans for national and state offices.
+In 2002, incumbent moderate Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was defeated by Republican Sonny Perdue, a state legislator and former Democrat. While Democrats retained control of the State House, they lost their majority in the Senate when four Democrats switched parties. They lost the House in the 2004 election. Republicans then controlled all three partisan elements of the state government.
+Even before 2002, the state had become increasingly supportive of Republicans in Presidential elections. It has supported a Democrat for president only three times since 1960. In 1976 and 1980, native son Jimmy Carter carried the state; in 1992, the former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton narrowly won the state. Generally, Republicans are strongest in the predominantly white suburban (especially the Atlanta suburbs) and rural portions of the state.[82] Many of these areas were represented by conservative Democrats in the state legislature well into the 21st century. One of the most conservative of these was U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald, former head of the John Birch Society, who died when the Soviet Union shot down KAL 007 near Sakhalin Island. Democratic candidates have tended to win a higher percentage of the vote in the areas where black voters are most numerous,[82] as well as in the cities among liberal urban populations (especially Atlanta and Athens), and the central and southwestern portion of the state.
+The ascendancy of the Republican Party in Georgia and in the South in general resulted in Georgia U.S. House of Representatives member Newt Gingrich being elected as Speaker of the House following the election of a Republican majority in the House in 1994. Gingrich served as Speaker until 1999, when he resigned in the aftermath of the loss of House seats held by members of the GOP. Gingrich mounted an unsuccessful bid for president in the 2012 election, but withdrew after winning only the South Carolina and Georgia primaries.
+In 2008, Democrat Jim Martin ran against incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss. Chambliss failed to acquire the necessary 50 percent of votes due to a Libertarian Party candidate receiving the remainder of votes. In the runoff election held on December 2, 2008, Chambliss became the second Georgia Republican to be reelected to the U.S. Senate.
+In the 2018 elections, the governor remained a Republican (by 54,723 votes against a democratic black female, Stacey Abrams), Republicans lost eight seats in the Georgia House of Representatives (winning 106), while Democrats gained ten (winning 74), Republicans lost two seats in the Georgia Senate (winning 35 seats), while Democrats gained two seats (winning 21), and five Democrat U.S. Representatives were elected with Republicans winning nine seats (one winning with just 419 votes over the Democratic challenger, and one seat being lost).[83][84][85]
+In the last three presidential elections as of 2018, the Republican candidate has won Georgia by approximately five to eight points over the Democratic nominee, at least once for each election being narrower than margins recorded in some states that have flipped within that timeframe, such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Therefore, it could potentially be regarded as a swing state in future elections should voter preferences only shift slightly.
+During the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia made significant changes in civil rights and governance. As in many other states, its legislature had not reapportioned congressional districts according to population from 1931 to after the 1960 census. Problems of malapportionment in the state legislature, where rural districts had outsize power in relation to urban districts, such as Atlanta's, were corrected after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964). The court ruled that congressional districts had to be reapportioned to have essentially equal populations.
+A related case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), required state legislatures to end their use of geographical districts or counties in favor of "one man, one vote"; that is, districts based upon approximately equal populations, to be reviewed and changed as necessary after each census. These changes resulted in residents of Atlanta and other urban areas gaining political power in Georgia in proportion to their populations.[86] From the mid-1960s, the voting electorate increased after African Americans' rights to vote were enforced under civil rights law.
+Economic growth through this period was dominated by Atlanta and its region. It was a bedrock of the emerging "New South". From the late 20th century, Atlanta attracted headquarters and relocated workers of national companies, becoming more diverse, liberal and cosmopolitan than many areas of the state.
+In the 21st century, many conservative Democrats, including former U.S. Senator and governor Zell Miller, decided to support Republicans. The state's socially conservative bent results in wide support for such measures as restrictions on abortion. In 2004, a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages was approved by 76% of voters.[87] However, after the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, all Georgia counties came into full compliance, recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state.[88]
+Georgia's 2018 total gross state product was $602 billion.[89] For years Georgia as a state has had the highest credit rating by Standard & Poor's (AAA) and is one of only 15 states with a AAA rating.[90] If Georgia were a stand-alone country, it would be the 28th largest economy in the world, based on data from 2005.[91]
+There are 17 Fortune 500 companies and 26 Fortune 1000 companies with headquarters in Georgia, including Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, TSYS, Delta Air Lines, Aflac, Southern Company, Anthem Inc., and SunTrust Banks.
+Atlanta boasts the world's busiest airport, as measured both by passenger traffic and by aircraft traffic.[93][94] Also, the Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport and fastest-growing container seaport in North America, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95]
+Atlanta has a large effect on the state of Georgia, the Southeastern United States, and beyond. Atlanta has been the site of growth in finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, service, logistics, transportation, film, communications, convention and trade show businesses and industries, while tourism is important to the economy. Atlanta is a global city, also called world city or sometimes alpha city or world center, as a city generally considered to be an important node in the global economic system.
+For the five years through November 2017, Georgia has been ranked the top state (number 1) in the nation to do business, and has been recognized as number 1 for business and labor climate in the nation, number 1 in business climate in the nation, number 1 in the nation in workforce training and as having a "Best in Class" state economic development agency.[96][97]
+In 2016, Georgia had median annual income per person of between $50,000 and $59,999, which is in inflation-adjusted dollars for 2016. The U.S. median annual income for the entire nation is $57,617. This lies within the range of Georgia's median annual income.[98]
+Widespread farms produce peanuts, corn, and soybeans across middle and south Georgia. The state is the number one producer of pecans in the world, with the region around Albany in southwest Georgia being the center of Georgia's pecan production. Gainesville in northeast Georgia touts itself as the Poultry Capital of the World. Georgia is in the top five blueberry producers in the United States.[99]
+Major products in the mineral industry include a variety of clays, stones, sands and the clay palygorskite, known as attapulgite.
+While many textile jobs moved overseas, there is still a textile industry located around the cities of Rome, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and along the I-75 corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Historically it started along the fall line in the Piedmont, where factories were powered by waterfalls and rivers. It includes the towns of Cartersville, Calhoun, Ringgold and Dalton[100]
+In November 2009, Kia started production in Georgia at the first U.S. Kia Motors plant, Kia Motors Manufacturing Georgia in West Point.
+Industrial products include textiles and apparel, transportation equipment, food processing, paper products, chemicals and products, and electric equipment.
+Georgia was ranked the number 2 state for infrastructure and global access by Area Development magazine.[101]
+The Georgia Ports Authority owns and operates four ports in the state: Port of Savannah, Port of Brunswick, Port Bainbridge, and Port Columbus. The Port of Savannah is the fourth largest seaport in the United States, importing and exporting a total of 2.3 million TEUs per year.[95] The Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal is the largest single container terminal in North America.[102] Several major companies including Target, IKEA, and Heineken operate distribution centers in close proximity to the Port of Savannah.
+Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport moves over 650,000 tons of cargo annually through three cargo complexes (two million square feet of floor space). It has nearby cold storage for perishables; it is the only airport in the Southeast with USDA-approved cold-treatment capabilities. Delta Air Lines also offers an on-airport refrigeration facility for perishable cargo, and a 250-acre Foreign Trade Zone is located at the airport.[103]
+Georgia is a major railway hub, has the most extensive rail system in the Southeast, and has the service of two Class I railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, plus 24 short-line railroads. Georgia is ranked the #3 state in the nation for rail accessibility. Rail shipments include intermodal, bulk, automotive and every other type of shipment.[104]
+Georgia has an extensive interstate highway system including 1,200 miles of interstate highway and 20,000 miles of federal and state highways that facilitate the efficient movement of more than $620 billion of cargo by truck each year. Georgia's six interstates connect to 80 percent of the U.S. population within a two-day truck drive. More than $14 billion in funding has been approved[when?] for new roadway infrastructure.[105]
+Southern Congressmen have attracted major investment by the U.S. military in the state. The several installations include Moody Air Force Base, Fort Stewart, Hunter Army Airfield, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Fort Benning, Robins Air Force Base, Fort Gordon, Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Coast Guard Air Station Savannah and Coast Guard Station Brunswick. These installations command numerous jobs and business for related contractors.
+Georgia's electricity generation and consumption are among the highest in the United States, with natural gas being the primary electrical generation fuel, followed by coal. The state also has two nuclear power facilities, Plant Hatch and Plant Vogtle, which contribute almost one fourth of Georgia's electricity generation, and an additional two nuclear power plants are under construction[when?] at Plant Vogtle. In 2013, the generation mix was 39% gas, 35% coal, 23% nuclear, 3% hydro and other renewable sources. The leading area of energy consumption is the industrial sector because Georgia "is a leader in the energy-intensive wood and paper products industry".[106] Solar generated energy is becoming more in use with solar energy generators currently installed ranking Georgia 15th in the country in installed solar capacity. In 2013, $189 million was invested in Georgia to install solar for home, business and utility use representing a 795% increase over the previous year.[107]
+Georgia has a progressive income tax structure with six brackets of state income tax rates that range from 1% to 6%. In 2009, Georgians paid 9% of their income in state and local taxes, compared to the U.S. average of 9.8% of income.[108] This ranks Georgia 25th among the states for total state and local tax burden.[108] The state sales tax in Georgia is 4%[109] with additional percentages added through local options (e.g. special-purpose local-option sales tax or SPLOST), but there is no sales tax on prescription drugs, certain medical devices, or food items for home consumption.[110]
+The state legislature may allow municipalities to institute local sales taxes and special local taxes, such as the 2% SPLOST tax and the 1% sales tax for MARTA serviced counties. Excise taxes are levied on alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel. Owners of real property in Georgia pay property tax to their county. All taxes are collected by the Georgia Department of Revenue and then properly distributed according to any agreements that each county has with its cities.
+The Georgia Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office promotes filming in the state.[111] Since 1972, seven hundred film and television projects have been filmed on location in Georgia.[112] Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state location with the most feature films produced. In FY2017, film and television production in Georgia had an economic impact of $9.5 billion.[113] Atlanta now is even called the "Hollywood of the South".[114] Television shows like Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, and The Vampire Diaries are filmed in the state.[115] Movies too, such as Passengers, Forrest Gump, Contagion, Hidden Figures, Sully, Baby Driver, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Birds of Prey and many more, were filmed around Georgia.[116][117]
+In the Atlanta area, World of Coke, Georgia Aquarium, Zoo Atlanta and Stone Mountain are important tourist attractions.[118][119] Stone Mountain is Georgia's "most popular attraction"; receiving more than four million tourists per year.[120][121] The Georgia Aquarium, in Atlanta, was the largest aquarium in the world in 2010 according to Guinness World Records.[122]
+Callaway Gardens, in western Georgia, is a family resort.[123] The area is also popular with golfers.
+The Savannah Historic District attracts more than eleven million tourists each year.[124]
+The Golden Isles is a string of barrier islands off the Atlantic coast of Georgia near Brunswick that includes beaches, golf courses and the Cumberland Island National Seashore.
+Several sites honor the lives and careers of noted American leaders: the Little White House in Warm Springs, which served as the summer residence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he was being treated for polio; President Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains and the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta; the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta, which is the final resting place of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King; and Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King preached.
+Georgia's major fine art museums include the High Museum of Art and the Michael C. Carlos Museum, both in Atlanta; the Georgia Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens; Telfair Museum of Art and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah; and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta.[125]
+The state theatre of Georgia is the Springer Opera House located in Columbus.
+The Atlanta Opera brings opera to Georgia stages.[126] The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the most widely recognized orchestra and largest arts organization in the southeastern United States.[127]
+There are a number of performing arts venues in the state, among the largest are the Fox Theatre, and the Alliance Theatre at the Woodruff Arts Center, both on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta as well as the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, located in Northwest Atlanta.
+Authors have grappled with Georgia's complex history. Popular novels related to this include Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.
+A number of noted authors, poets and playwrights have lived in Georgia, such as James Dickey, Flannery O'Connor, Sidney Lanier, Frank Yerby and Lewis Grizzard.[128]
+Well-known television shows set in Atlanta include, from Tyler Perry Studios, House of Payne and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the CBS sitcom Designing Women, Matlock, the popular AMC series The Walking Dead, Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva, Rectify and numerous HGTV original productions.
+The Dukes of Hazzard, a 1980s TV show, was set in the fictional Hazzard County, Georgia. The first five episodes were shot on location in Conyers and Covington, Georgia as well as some locations in Atlanta. Production was then moved to Burbank, California.[citation needed]
+Also filmed in Georgia is The Vampire Diaries, using Covington as the setting for the fictional Mystic Falls.
+A number of notable musicians in various genres of popular music are from Georgia. Among them are Ray Charles (whose many hits include "Georgia on My Mind", now the official state song), and Gladys Knight (known for her Georgia-themed song, "Midnight Train to Georgia").
+Rock groups from Georgia include the Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Black Crowes, and The Allman Brothers.
+The university city of Athens sparked an influential rock music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Among the groups achieving their initial prominence there were R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and the B-52's.
+Since the 1990s, various hip-hop and R&B musicians have included top-selling artists such as Outkast, Usher, Ludacris, TLC, B.o.B., and Ciara. Atlanta is mentioned in a number of these artists' tracks, such as Usher's "A-Town Down" reference in his 2004 hit "Yeah!" (which also features Atlanta artists Lil Jon and Ludacris), Ludacris' "Welcome to Atlanta", Outkast's album "ATLiens", and B.o.B.'s multiple references to Decatur, Georgia, as in his hit song "Strange Clouds".
+Two movies, both set in Atlanta, won Oscars for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind (1939) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Other films set in Georgia include Deliverance (1972), Parental Guidance (2012), and Vacation.
+Sports in Georgia include professional teams in nearly all major sports, Olympic Games contenders and medalists, collegiate teams in major and small-school conferences and associations, and active amateur teams and individual sports. The state of Georgia has teams in four major professional leagues—the Atlanta Braves of Major League Baseball, the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League, the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball Association, and Atlanta United FC of Major League Soccer.
+The Georgia Bulldogs (Southeastern Conference), Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Atlantic Coast Conference), Georgia State Panthers and Georgia Southern Eagles (Sun Belt Conference) are Georgia's NCAA Division I FBS football teams, having won multiple national championships between them. The Georgia Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets have a historical rivalry in college football known as Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, and the Georgia State Panthers and the Georgia Southern Eagles have recently developed their own rivalry.
+The 1996 Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta. The stadium that was built to host various Olympic events was converted to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves through 2016.
+The Masters golf tournament, the first of the PGA tour's four "majors", is held annually the second weekend of April at the Augusta National Golf Club.
+The Atlanta Motor Speedway hosts the Dixie 500 NASCAR Cup Series stock car race and Road Atlanta the Petit Le Mans endurance sports car race.
+Atlanta's Georgia Dome hosted Super Bowl XXVIII in 1994 and Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. The Georgia Dome hosted the NCAA Final Four Men's Basketball National Championship in 2002, 2007, and 2013.[129]
+It hosted WWE's WrestleMania XXVII in 2011, an event which set an attendance record of 71,617. The dome was also the venue of the annual Chick-fil-A Bowl post-season college football games. Since 2017, they have been held at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium along with the FIRST World Championships.
+Professional baseball's Ty Cobb was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was from Narrows and was nicknamed the "Georgia Peach".[130]
+There are 48 state parks, 15 historic sites, and numerous wildlife preserves under supervision of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.[131] Other historic sites and parks are supervised by the National Park Service and include the Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville; Appalachian National Scenic Trail; Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area near Atlanta; Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park at Fort Oglethorpe; Cumberland Island National Seashore near St. Marys; Fort Frederica National Monument on St. Simons Island; Fort Pulaski National Monument in Savannah; Jimmy Carter National Historic Site near Plains; Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park near Kennesaw; Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site in Atlanta; Ocmulgee National Monument at Macon; Trail of Tears National Historic Trail; and the Okefenokee Swamp in Waycross, Georgia[132]
+Outdoor recreational activities include hiking along the Appalachian Trail; Civil War Heritage Trails; rock climbing and whitewater kayaking.[133][134][135][136] Other outdoor activities include hunting and fishing.
+Georgia county and city public school systems are administered by school boards with members elected at the local level. As of 2013[update], all but 19 of 181 boards are elected from single-member districts. Residents and activist groups in Fayette County, Georgia sued the board of commissioners and school board for maintaining an election system based on at-large voting, which tended to increase the power of the majority and effectively prevented minority participation on elected local boards for nearly 200 years.[137] A change to single-member districts has resulted in the African-American minority being able to elect representatives of its choice.
+Georgia high schools (grades nine through twelve) are required to administer a standardized, multiple choice End of Course Test, or EOCT, in each of eight core subjects: algebra, geometry, U.S. history, economics, biology, physical science, ninth grade literature and composition, and American literature. The official purpose of the tests is to assess "specific content knowledge and skills". Although a minimum test score is not required for the student to receive credit in the course, completion of the test is mandatory. The EOCT score accounts for 15% of a student's grade in the course.[138] The Georgia Milestone evaluation is taken by public school students in the state.[139]
+Georgia has 85 public colleges, universities, and technical colleges in addition to more than 45 private institutes of higher learning. Among Georgia's public universities is the flagship research university, the University of Georgia, founded in 1785 as the country's oldest state-chartered university and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education.[140] The University System of Georgia is the presiding body over public post-secondary education in the state. The System includes 29 institutions of higher learning and is governed by the Georgia Board of Regents. Georgia's workforce of more than 6.3 million is constantly refreshed by the growing number of people who move there along with the 90,000 graduates from the universities, colleges and technical colleges across the state, including the highly ranked University of Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University and Emory University.[141]
+The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, is available to all Georgia residents who have graduated from high school or earned a General Educational Development certificate. The student must maintain a 3.2 or higher grade point average and attend a public college or university in the state.
+The Georgia Historical Society, an independent educational and research institution, has a research center located in Savannah. The research center's library and archives hold the oldest collection of materials related to Georgia history in the nation.
+The Atlanta metropolitan area is the ninth largest media market in the United States as ranked by Nielsen Media Research. The state's other top markets are Savannah (95th largest), Augusta (115th largest), and Columbus (127th largest).[142]
+There are 48 television broadcast stations in Georgia including TBS, TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, CNN and Headline News, all founded by notable Georgia resident Ted Turner. The Weather Channel also has its headquarters in Atlanta.
+By far, the largest daily newspaper in Georgia is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a daily readership of 195,592 and a Sunday readership of 397,925.[143][144] Other large dailies include The Augusta Chronicle, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, The Telegraph (formerly The Macon Telegraph) and the Savannah Morning News.
+WSB-AM in Atlanta was the first licensed radio station in the southeastern United States, signing on in 1922. Georgia Public Radio has been in service since 1984[145][146] and, with the exception of Atlanta, it broadcasts daily on several FM (and one AM) stations across the state. Georgia Public Radio reaches nearly all of Georgia (with the exception of the Atlanta area, which is served by WABE).
+WSB-TV in Atlanta is the state's oldest television station, having begun operations in 1948. WSB was only the second such operation founded in the Southern U.S., trailing only WTVR in Richmond, Virginia.[citation needed]
+Transportation in Georgia is overseen by the Georgia Department of Transportation, a part of the executive branch of the state government. Georgia's major Interstate Highways are I-20, I-75, I-85, and I-95. On March 18, 1998, the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution naming the portion of Interstate Highway 75, which runs from the Chattahoochee River northward to the Tennessee state line the Larry McDonald Memorial Highway. Larry McDonald, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives, had been on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by the Soviets on September 1, 1983.
+Georgia's primary commercial airport is Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), the world's busiest airport.[147] In addition to Hartsfield–Jackson, there are eight other airports serving major commercial traffic in Georgia. Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport is the second-busiest airport in the state as measured by passengers served, and is the only additional international airport. Other commercial airports (ranked in order of passengers served) are located in Augusta, Columbus, Albany, Macon, Brunswick, Valdosta, and Athens.[148]
+The Georgia Ports Authority manages two deepwater seaports, at Savannah and Brunswick, and two river ports, at Bainbridge and Columbus. The Port of Savannah is a major U.S. seaport on the Atlantic coast.
+The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is the principal rapid transit system in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Formed in 1971 as strictly a bus system, MARTA operates a network of bus routes linked to a rapid transit system consisting of 48 miles (77 km) of rail track with 38 train stations. MARTA operates almost exclusively in Fulton and DeKalb counties, with bus service to two destinations in Cobb county and the Cumberland Transfer Center next to the Cumberland Mall, and a single rail station in Clayton County at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport. MARTA also operates a separate paratransit service for disabled customers. As of 2009[update], the average total daily ridership for the system (bus and rail) was 482,500 passengers.[149]
+The state has 151 general hospitals, more than 15,000 doctors and almost 6,000 dentists.[150] The state is ranked forty-first in the percentage of residents who engage in regular exercise.[151]
+Jimmy Carter, from Plains, Georgia, was President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929. He was a civil rights movement leader fighting for rights for African Americans and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.[152] Mordecai Sheftall, the highest ranking Jewish officer in the American Revolution, was born and lived his life in Georgia.[153]
+Reference: Georgia Symbols[154]
+Coordinates: 33°00′N 83°30′W / 33°N 83.5°W / 33; -83.5

en/2196.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@

+German (Deutsch, pronounced [dɔʏtʃ] (listen)) is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol in Italy, the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and Liechtenstein. It is one of the three official languages of Luxembourg and a co-official language in the Opole Voivodeship in Poland. The German language is most similar to other languages within the West Germanic language branch, including Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, Low German/Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Yiddish. It also contains close similarities in vocabulary to Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, although they belong to the North Germanic group. German is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English.
+One of the major languages of the world, German is a native language to almost 100 million people worldwide and the most widely spoken native language in the European Union.[6] German is the third most commonly spoken foreign language in the EU after English and French, making it the second biggest language in the EU in terms of overall speakers. German is also the second most widely taught foreign language in the EU after English at primary school level (but third after English and French at lower secondary level), the fourth most widely taught non-English language in the US (after Spanish, French and American Sign Language), the second most commonly used scientific language and the third most widely used language on websites after English and Russian. The German-speaking countries are ranked fifth in terms of annual publication of new books, with one tenth of all books (including e-books) in the world being published in German. In the United Kingdom, German and French are the most sought-after foreign languages for businesses (with 49% and 50% of businesses identifying these two languages as the most useful, respectively).[7]
+German is an inflected language with four cases for nouns, pronouns and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), two numbers (singular, plural), and strong and weak verbs. It derives the majority of its vocabulary from the ancient Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Some of its vocabulary is derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and Modern English. German is a pluricentric language, with its standardized variants being (German, Austrian, and Swiss Standard German). It is also notable for its broad spectrum of dialects, with many unique varieties existing in Europe and other parts of the world. Italy recognizes all the German-speaking minorities in its territory as national historic minorities and protects the varieties of German spoken in several regions of Northern Italy besides South Tyrol.[8][9] Due to the limited intelligibility between certain varieties and Standard German, as well as the lack of an undisputed, scientific difference between a "dialect" and a "language", some German varieties or dialect groups (e.g. Low German or Plautdietsch[3]) can be described as either "languages" or "dialects".
+Modern Standard German is a West Germanic language in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Germanic languages are traditionally subdivided into three branches: North Germanic, East Germanic, and West Germanic. The first of these branches survives in modern Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic, all of which are descended from Old Norse. The East Germanic languages are now extinct, and Gothic is the only language in this branch which survives in written texts. The West Germanic languages, however, have undergone extensive dialectal subdivision and are now represented in modern languages such as English, German, Dutch, Yiddish, Afrikaans, and others.[10]
+Within the West Germanic language dialect continuum, the Benrath and Uerdingen lines (running through Düsseldorf-Benrath and Krefeld-Uerdingen, respectively) serve to distinguish the Germanic dialects that were affected by the High German consonant shift (south of Benrath) from those that were not (north of Uerdingen). The various regional dialects spoken south of these lines are grouped as High German dialects (nos. 29–34 on the map), while those spoken to the north comprise the Low German/Low Saxon (nos. 19–24) and Low Franconian (no. 25) dialects. As members of the West Germanic language family, High German, Low German, and Low Franconian can be further distinguished historically as Irminonic, Ingvaeonic, and Istvaeonic, respectively. This classification indicates their historical descent from dialects spoken by the Irminones (also known as the Elbe group), Ingvaeones (or North Sea Germanic group), and Istvaeones (or Weser-Rhine group).[10]
+Standard German is based on a combination of Thuringian-Upper Saxon and Upper Franconian and Bavarian dialects, which are Central German and Upper German dialects, belonging to the Irminonic High German dialect group (nos. 29–34). German is therefore closely related to the other languages based on High German dialects, such as Luxembourgish (based on Central Franconian dialects – no. 29), and Yiddish. Also closely related to Standard German are the Upper German dialects spoken in the southern German-speaking countries, such as Swiss German (Alemannic dialects – no. 34), and the various Germanic dialects spoken in the French region of Grand Est, such as Alsatian (mainly Alemannic, but also Central- and Upper Franconian (no. 32) dialects) and Lorraine Franconian (Central Franconian – no. 29).
+After these High German dialects, standard German is less closely related to languages based on Low Franconian dialects (e.g. Dutch and Afrikaans) or Low German/Low Saxon dialects (spoken in northern Germany and southern Denmark), neither of which underwent the High German consonant shift. As has been noted, the former of these dialect types is Istvaeonic and the latter Ingvaeonic, whereas the High German dialects are all Irminonic: the differences between these languages and standard German are therefore considerable. Also related to German are the Frisian languages—North Frisian (spoken in Nordfriesland – no. 28), Saterland Frisian (spoken in Saterland – no. 27), and West Frisian (spoken in Friesland – no. 26)—as well as the Anglic languages of English and Scots. These Anglo-Frisian dialects are all members of the Ingvaeonic family of West Germanic languages, which did not take part in the High German consonant shift.
+The history of the German language begins with the High German consonant shift during the migration period, which separated Old High German (OHG) dialects from Old Saxon. This sound shift involved a drastic change in the pronunciation of both voiced and voiceless stop consonants (b, d, g, and p, t, k, respectively). The primary effects of the shift were the following:
+While there is written evidence of the Old High German language in several Elder Futhark inscriptions from as early as the 6th century AD (such as the Pforzen buckle), the Old High German period is generally seen as beginning with the Abrogans (written c.765–775), a Latin-German glossary supplying over 3,000 OHG words with their Latin equivalents. After the Abrogans, the first coherent works written in OHG appear in the 9th century, chief among them being the Muspilli, the Merseburg Charms, and the Hildebrandslied, as well as a number of other religious texts (the Georgslied, the Ludwigslied, the Evangelienbuch, and translated hymns and prayers).[11][12] The Muspilli is a Christian poem written in a Bavarian dialect offering an account of the soul after the Last Judgment, and the Merseburg Charms are transcriptions of spells and charms from the pagan Germanic tradition. Of particular interest to scholars, however, has been the Hildebrandslied, a secular epic poem telling the tale of an estranged father and son unknowingly meeting each other in battle. Linguistically this text is highly interesting due to the mixed use of Old Saxon and Old High German dialects in its composition. The written works of this period stem mainly from the Alamanni, Bavarian, and Thuringian groups, all belonging to the Elbe Germanic group (Irminones), which had settled in what is now southern-central Germany and Austria between the 2nd and 6th centuries during the great migration.[11]
+In general, the surviving texts of OHG show a wide range of dialectal diversity with very little written uniformity. The early written tradition of OHG survived mostly through monasteries and scriptoria as local translations of Latin originals; as a result, the surviving texts are written in highly disparate regional dialects and exhibit significant Latin influence, particularly in vocabulary.[11] At this point monasteries, where most written works were produced, were dominated by Latin, and German saw only occasional use in official and ecclesiastical writing.
+The German language through the OHG period was still predominantly a spoken language, with a wide range of dialects and a much more extensive oral tradition than a written one. Having just emerged from the High German consonant shift, OHG was also a relatively new and volatile language still undergoing a number of phonetic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes. The scarcity of written work, instability of the language, and widespread illiteracy of the time explain the lack of standardization up to the end of the OHG period in 1050.
+While there is no complete agreement over the dates of the Middle High German (MHG) period, it is generally seen as lasting from 1050 to 1350.[13][14] This was a period of significant expansion of the geographical territory occupied by Germanic tribes, and consequently of the number of German speakers. Whereas during the Old High German period the Germanic tribes extended only as far east as the Elbe and Saale rivers, the MHG period saw a number of these tribes expanding beyond this eastern boundary into Slavic territory (known as the Ostsiedlung). With the increasing wealth and geographic spread of the Germanic groups came greater use of German in the courts of nobles as the standard language of official proceedings and literature.[14][15] A clear example of this is the mittelhochdeutsche Dichtersprache employed in the Hohenstaufen court in Swabia as a standardized supra-dialectal written language. While these efforts were still regionally bound, German began to be used in place of Latin for certain official purposes, leading to a greater need for regularity in written conventions.
+While the major changes of the MHG period were socio-cultural, German was still undergoing significant linguistic changes in syntax, phonetics, and morphology as well (e.g. diphthongization of certain vowel sounds: hus (OHG "house")→haus (MHG), and weakening of unstressed short vowels to schwa [ə]: taga (OHG "days")→tage (MHG)).[16]
+A great wealth of texts survives from the MHG period. Significantly, these texts include a number of impressive secular works, such as the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem telling the story of the dragon-slayer Siegfried (c. 13th century), and the Iwein, an Arthurian verse poem by Hartmann von Aue (c. 1203), as well as several lyric poems and courtly romances such as Parzival and Tristan. Also noteworthy is the Sachsenspiegel, the first book of laws written in Middle Low German (c. 1220). The abundance and especially the secular character of the literature of the MHG period demonstrate the beginnings of a standardized written form of German, as well as the desire of poets and authors to be understood by individuals on supra-dialectal terms.
+The Middle High German period is generally seen as ending when the 1346-53 Black Death decimated Europe's population.[13]
+Modern German begins with the Early New High German (ENHG) period, which the influential German philologist Wilhelm Scherer dates 1350–1650, terminating with the end of the Thirty Years' War.[13] This period saw the further displacement of Latin by German as the primary language of courtly proceedings and, increasingly, of literature in the German states. While these states were still under the control of the Holy Roman Empire and far from any form of unification, the desire for a cohesive written language that would be understandable across the many German-speaking principalities and kingdoms was stronger than ever. As a spoken language German remained highly fractured throughout this period, with a vast number of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects being spoken throughout the German states; the invention of the printing press c. 1440 and the publication of Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible in 1534, however, had an immense effect on standardizing German as a supra-dialectal written language.
+The ENHG period saw the rise of several important cross-regional forms of chancery German, one being gemeine tiutsch, used in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and the other being Meißner Deutsch, used in the Electorate of Saxony in the Duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg.[17] Alongside these courtly written standards, the invention of the printing press led to the development of a number of printers' languages (Druckersprachen) aimed at making printed material readable and understandable across as many diverse dialects of German as possible.[18] The greater ease of production and increased availability of written texts brought about increased standardization in the written form of German.
+One of the central events in the development of ENHG was the publication of Luther's translation of the Bible into German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Luther based his translation primarily on the Meißner Deutsch of Saxony, spending much time among the population of Saxony researching the dialect so as to make the work as natural and accessible to German speakers as possible. Copies of Luther's Bible featured a long list of glosses for each region, translating words which were unknown in the region into the regional dialect. Luther said the following concerning his translation method:
+One who would talk German does not ask the Latin how he shall do it; he must ask the mother in the home, the children on the streets, the common man in the market-place and note carefully how they talk, then translate accordingly. They will then understand what is said to them because it is German. When Christ says 'ex abundantia cordis os loquitur,' I would translate, if I followed the papists, aus dem Überflusz des Herzens redet der Mund. But tell me is this talking German? What German understands such stuff? No, the mother in the home and the plain man would say, Wesz das Herz voll ist, des gehet der Mund über.[19]
+With Luther's rendering of the Bible in the vernacular, German asserted itself against the dominance of Latin as a legitimate language for courtly, literary, and now ecclesiastical subject-matter. Furthermore, his Bible was ubiquitous in the German states: nearly every household possessed a copy.[20] Nevertheless, even with the influence of Luther's Bible as an unofficial written standard, a widely accepted standard for written German did not appear until the middle of the 18th century.[21]
+German was the language of commerce and government in the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed a large area of Central and Eastern Europe. Until the mid-19th century, it was essentially the language of townspeople throughout most of the Empire. Its use indicated that the speaker was a merchant or someone from an urban area, regardless of nationality.
+Some cities, such as Prague (German: Prag) and Budapest (Buda, German: Ofen), were gradually Germanized in the years after their incorporation into the Habsburg domain. Others, such as Pozsony (German: Pressburg, now Bratislava), were originally settled during the Habsburg period and were primarily German at that time. Prague, Budapest and Bratislava, as well as cities like Zagreb (German: Agram) and Ljubljana (German: Laibach), contained significant German minorities.
+In the eastern provinces of Banat, Bukovina, and Transylvania (German: Banat, Buchenland, Siebenbürgen), German was the predominant language not only in the larger towns – such as Temeschburg (Timișoara), Hermannstadt (Sibiu) and Kronstadt (Brașov) – but also in many smaller localities in the surrounding areas.[22]
+The most comprehensive guide to the vocabulary of the German language is found within the Deutsches Wörterbuch. This dictionary was created by the Brothers Grimm and is composed of 16 parts which were issued between 1852 and 1860.[23] In 1872, grammatical and orthographic rules first appeared in the Duden Handbook.[24]
+In 1901, the 2nd Orthographical Conference ended with a complete standardization of the German language in its written form and the Duden Handbook was declared its standard definition.[25] The Deutsche Bühnensprache (literally, German stage language) had established conventions for German pronunciation in theatres (Bühnendeutsch[26]) three years earlier; however, this was an artificial standard that did not correspond to any traditional spoken dialect. Rather, it was based on the pronunciation of Standard German in Northern Germany, although it was subsequently regarded often as a general prescriptive norm, despite differing pronunciation traditions especially in the Upper-German-speaking regions that still characterize the dialect of the area today – especially the pronunciation of the ending -ig as [ɪk] instead of [ɪç]. In Northern Germany, Standard German was a foreign language to most inhabitants, whose native dialects were subsets of Low German. It was usually encountered only in writing or formal speech; in fact, most of Standard German was a written language, not identical to any spoken dialect, throughout the German-speaking area until well into the 19th century.
+Official revisions of some of the rules from 1901 were not issued until the controversial German orthography reform of 1996 was made the official standard by governments of all German-speaking countries.[27] Media and written works are now almost all produced in Standard German (often called Hochdeutsch, "High German") which is understood in all areas where German is spoken.
+Approximate distribution of native German speakers (assuming a rounded total of 95 million) worldwide
+Due to the German diaspora as well as German being the second most widely spoken language in Europe and the third most widely taught foreign language in the US[28] and the EU (in upper secondary education)[29] amongst others, the geographical distribution of German speakers (or "Germanophones") spans all inhabited continents. As for the number of speakers of any language worldwide, an assessment is always compromised by the lack of sufficient, reliable data. For an exact, global number of native German speakers, this is further complicated by the existence of several varieties whose status as separate "languages" or "dialects" is disputed for political and/or linguistic reasons, including quantitatively strong varieties like certain forms of Alemannic (e.g., Alsatian) and Low German/Plautdietsch.[3] Depending on the inclusion or exclusion of certain varieties, it is estimated that approximately 90–95 million people speak German as a first language,[30][31] 10–25 million as a second language,[30] and 75–100 million as a foreign language.[1] This would imply the existence of approximately 175–220 million German speakers worldwide.[32] It is estimated that including every person studying German, regardless of their actual proficiency, would amount to about 280 million people worldwide with at least some knowledge of German.
+In Europe, German is the second most widely spoken mother tongue (after Russian) and the second biggest language in terms of overall speakers (after English). The area in central Europe where the majority of the population speaks German as a first language and has German as a (co-)official language is called the "German Sprachraum". It comprises an estimated 88 million native speakers and 10 million who speak German as a second language (e.g. immigrants).[30] Excluding regional minority languages, German is the only official language of the following countries:
+German is a co-official language of the following countries:
+Although expulsions and (forced) assimilation after the two World Wars greatly diminished them, minority communities of mostly bilingual German native speakers exist in areas both adjacent to and detached from the Sprachraum.
+Within Europe and Asia, German is a recognized minority language in the following countries:
+In France, the High German varieties of Alsatian and Moselle Franconian are identified as "regional languages", but the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages of 1998 has not yet been ratified by the government.[39] In the Netherlands, the Limburgish, Frisian, and Low German languages are protected regional languages according to the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages;[33] however, they are widely considered separate languages and neither German nor Dutch dialects.
+Namibia was a colony of the German Empire from 1884 to 1919. Mostly descending from German settlers who immigrated during this time, 25–30,000 people still speak German as a native tongue today.[40] The period of German colonialism in Namibia also led to the evolution of a Standard German-based pidgin language called "Namibian Black German", which became a second language for parts of the indigenous population. Although it is nearly extinct today, some older Namibians still have some knowledge of it.[41]
+German, along with English and Afrikaans, was a co-official language of Namibia from 1984 until its independence from South Africa in 1990. At this point, the Namibian government perceived Afrikaans and German as symbols of apartheid and colonialism, and decided English would be the sole official language, stating that it was a "neutral" language as there were virtually no English native speakers in Namibia at that time.[40] German, Afrikaans and several indigenous languages became "national languages" by law, identifying them as elements of the cultural heritage of the nation and ensuring that the state acknowledged and supported their presence in the country. Today, German is used in a wide variety of spheres, especially business and tourism, as well as the churches (most notably the German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (GELK)), schools (e.g. the Deutsche Höhere Privatschule Windhoek), literature (German-Namibian authors include Giselher W. Hoffmann), radio (the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation produces radio programs in German), and music (e.g. artist EES). The Allgemeine Zeitung is one of the three biggest newspapers in Namibia and the only German-language daily in Africa.[40]
+Mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries, an estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa.[42] One of the largest communities consists of the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch",[43] a variety of Low German concentrated in and around Wartburg. The small town of Kroondal in the North-West Province also has a mostly German-speaking population. The South African constitution identifies German as a "commonly used" language and the Pan South African Language Board is obligated to promote and ensure respect for it.[44] The community is strong enough that several German International schools are supported, such as the Deutsche Schule Pretoria.
+In the United States, the states of North Dakota and South Dakota are the only states where German is the most common language spoken at home after English.[45] German geographical names can be found throughout the Midwest region of the country, such as New Ulm and many other towns in Minnesota; Bismarck (North Dakota's state capital), Munich, Karlsruhe, and Strasburg (named after a town near Odessa in Ukraine)[46] in North Dakota; New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Weimar, and Muenster in Texas; Corn (formerly Korn), Kiefer and Berlin in Oklahoma; and Kiel, Berlin, and Germantown in Wisconsin.
+In Brazil, the largest concentrations of German speakers are in the states of Rio Grande do Sul (where Riograndenser Hunsrückisch developed), Santa Catarina, Paraná, São Paulo and Espírito Santo.[47]
+There are important concentrations of German-speaking descendants in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia.[42]
+The impact of nineteenth century German immigration to southern Chile was such that Valdivia was for a while a Spanish-German bilingual city with "German signboards and placards alongside the Spanish".[54] The prestige[note 4] the German language caused it to acquire qualities of a superstratum in southern Chile.[56] The word for blackberry, a ubiquitous plant in southern Chile, is murra, instead of the ordinary Spanish words mora and zarzamora, from Valdivia to the Chiloé Archipelago and in some towns in the Aysén Region.[56] The use of rr is an adaptation of guttural sounds found in German but difficult to pronounce in Spanish.[56] Similarly the name for marbles, a traditional children's game, is different in Southern Chile compared to areas further north. From Valdivia to the Aysén Region this game is called bochas, in contrast to the word bolitas used further north.[56] The word bocha is likely a derivative of the German Bocciaspiel.[56]
+In Australia, the state of South Australia experienced a pronounced wave of immigration in the 1840s from Prussia (particularly the Silesia region). With the prolonged isolation from other German speakers and contact with Australian English, a unique dialect known as Barossa German developed, spoken predominantly in the Barossa Valley near Adelaide. Usage of German sharply declined with the advent of World War I, due to the prevailing anti-German sentiment in the population and related government action. It continued to be used as a first language into the 20th century, but its use is now limited to a few older speakers.[57]
+German migration to New Zealand in the 19th century was less pronounced than migration from Britain, Ireland, and perhaps even Scandinavia. Despite this there were significant pockets of German-speaking communities which lasted until the first decades of the 20th century. German speakers settled principally in Puhoi, Nelson, and Gore. At the last census (2013), 36,642 people in New Zealand spoke German, making it the third most spoken European language after English and French and overall the ninth most spoken language.[58]
+There is also an important German creole being studied and recovered, named Unserdeutsch, spoken in the former German colony of German New Guinea, across Micronesia and in northern Australia (i.e. coastal parts of Queensland and Western Australia) by a few elderly people. The risk of its extinction is serious and efforts to revive interest in the language are being implemented by scholars.[59]
+Like French and Spanish, German has become a standard second foreign language in the western world.[1][60] German ranks second (after English) among the best known foreign languages in the EU (on a par with French)[1] as well as in Russia.[61] In terms of student numbers across all levels of education, German ranks third in the EU (after English and French)[29] as well as in the United States (after Spanish and French).[28][62] In 2015, approximately 15.4 million people were in the process of learning German across all levels of education worldwide.[60] As this number remained relatively stable since 2005 (± 1 million), roughly 75–100 million people able to communicate in German as a foreign language can be inferred, assuming an average course duration of three years and other estimated parameters. According to a 2012 survey, 47 million people within the EU (i.e., up to two-thirds of the 75–100 million worldwide) claimed to have sufficient German skills to have a conversation. Within the EU, not counting countries where it is an official language, German as a foreign language is most popular in Eastern and northern Europe, namely the Czech Republic, Croatia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Sweden and Poland.[1][63] German was once, and to some extent still is, a lingua franca in those parts of Europe.[64]
+The basis of Standard German is the Luther Bible, which was translated by Martin Luther and which had originated from the Saxon court language (it being a convenient norm).[65] However, there are places where the traditional regional dialects have been replaced by new vernaculars based on standard German; that is the case in large stretches of Northern Germany but also in major cities in other parts of the country. It is important to note, however, that the colloquial standard German differs greatly from the formal written language, especially in grammar and syntax, in which it has been influenced by dialectal speech.
+Standard German differs regionally among German-speaking countries in vocabulary and some instances of pronunciation and even grammar and orthography. This variation must not be confused with the variation of local dialects. Even though the regional varieties of standard German are only somewhat influenced by the local dialects, they are very distinct. German is thus considered a pluricentric language.
+In most regions, the speakers use a continuum from more dialectal varieties to more standard varieties depending on the circumstances.
+In German linguistics, German dialects are distinguished from varieties of standard German.
+The varieties of standard German refer to the different local varieties of the pluricentric standard German. They differ only slightly in lexicon and phonology. In certain regions, they have replaced the traditional German dialects, especially in Northern Germany.
+In the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, mixtures of dialect and standard are very seldom used, and the use of Standard German is largely restricted to the written language. About 11% of the Swiss residents speak High German (Standard German) at home, but this is mainly due to German immigrants.[67] This situation has been called a medial diglossia. Swiss Standard German is used in the Swiss education system, while Austrian Standard German is officially used in the Austrian education system.
+A mixture of dialect and standard does not normally occur in Northern Germany either. The traditional varieties there are Low German, whereas Standard German is a High German "variety". Because their linguistic distance is greater, they do not mesh with Standard German the way that High German dialects (such as Bavarian, Swabian, and Hessian) can.
+The German dialects are the traditional local varieties of the language; many of them are not mutually intelligibile with standard German, and they have great differences in lexicon, phonology, and syntax. If a narrow definition of language based on mutual intelligibility is used, many German dialects are considered to be separate languages (for instance in the Ethnologue). However, such a point of view is unusual in German linguistics.
+The German dialect continuum is traditionally divided most broadly into High German and Low German, also called Low Saxon. However, historically, High German dialects and Low Saxon/Low German dialects do not belong to the same language. Nevertheless, in today's Germany, Low Saxon/Low German is often perceived as a dialectal variation of Standard German on a functional level even by many native speakers. The same phenomenon is found in the eastern Netherlands, as the traditional dialects are not always identified with their Low Saxon/Low German origins, but with Dutch.[68][better source needed]
+The variation among the German dialects is considerable, with often only neighbouring dialects being mutually intelligible. Some dialects are not intelligible to people who know only Standard German. However, all German dialects belong to the dialect continuum of High German and Low Saxon.
+Middle Low German was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League. It was the predominant language in Northern Germany until the 16th century. In 1534, the Luther Bible was published. The translation is considered to be an important step towards the evolution of the Early New High German. It aimed to be understandable to a broad audience and was based mainly on Central and Upper German varieties. The Early New High German language gained more prestige than Low German and became the language of science and literature. Around the same time, the Hanseatic League, based around northern ports, lost its importance as new trade routes to Asia and the Americas were established, and the most powerful German states of that period were located in Middle and Southern Germany.
+The 18th and 19th centuries were marked by mass education in Standard German in schools. Gradually, Low German came to be politically viewed as a mere dialect spoken by the uneducated. Today, Low Saxon can be divided in two groups: Low Saxon varieties with a reasonable level of Standard German influence and varieties of Standard German with a Low Saxon influence known as Missingsch. Sometimes, Low Saxon and Low Franconian varieties are grouped together because both are unaffected by the High German consonant shift. However, the proportion of the population who can understand and speak it has decreased continuously since World War II. The largest cities in the Low German area are Hamburg and Dortmund.
+The Low Franconian dialects are the dialects that are more closely related to Dutch than to Low German. Most of the Low Franconian dialects are spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium, where they are considered as dialects of Dutch, which is itself a Low Franconian language. In Germany, Low Franconian dialects are spoken in the northwest of North Rhine-Westphalia, along the Lower Rhine. The Low Franconian dialects spoken in Germany are referred to as Meuse-Rhenish or Low Rhenish. In the north of the German Low Franconian language area, North Low Franconian dialects (also referred to as Cleverlands or as dialects of South Guelderish) are spoken. These dialects are more closely related to Dutch (also North Low Franconian) than the South Low Franconian dialects (also referred to as East Limburgish and, east of the Rhine, Bergish), which are spoken in the south of the German Low Franconian language area. The South Low Franconian dialects are more closely related to Limburgish than to Dutch, and are transitional dialects between Low Franconian and Ripuarian (Central Franconian). The East Bergish dialects are the easternmost Low Franconian dialects, and are transitional dialects between North- and South Low Franconian, and Westphalian (Low German), with most of their features being North Low Franconian. The largest cities in the German Low Franconian area are Düsseldorf and Duisburg.
+The High German dialects consist of the Central German, High Franconian, and Upper German dialects. The High Franconian dialects are transitional dialects between Central and Upper German. The High German varieties spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews have several unique features and are considered as a separate language, Yiddish, written with the Hebrew alphabet.
+The Central German dialects are spoken in Central Germany, from Aachen in the west to Görlitz in the east. They consist of Franconian dialects in the west (West Central German) and non-Franconian dialects in the east (East Central German). Modern Standard German is mostly based on Central German dialects.
+The Franconian, West Central German dialects are the Central Franconian dialects (Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian) and the Rhine Franconian dialects (Hessian and Palatine). These dialects are considered as
+Luxembourgish as well as the Transylvanian Saxon dialect spoken in Transylvania are based on Moselle Franconian dialects. The largest cities in the Franconian Central German area are Cologne and Frankfurt.
+Further east, the non-Franconian, East Central German dialects are spoken (Thuringian, Upper Saxon, Ore Mountainian, and Lusatian-New Markish, and earlier, in the then German-speaking parts of Silesia also Silesian, and in then German southern East Prussia also High Prussian). The largest cities in the East Central German area are Berlin and Leipzig.
+The High Franconian dialects are transitional dialects between Central and Upper German. They consist of the East and South Franconian dialects.
+The East Franconian dialect branch is one of the most spoken dialect branches in Germany. These dialects are spoken in the region of Franconia and in the central parts of Saxon Vogtland. Franconia consists of the Bavarian districts of Upper, Middle, and Lower Franconia, the region of South Thuringia (Thuringia), and the eastern parts of the region of Heilbronn-Franken (Tauber Franconia and Hohenlohe) in Baden-Württemberg. The largest cities in the East Franconian area are Nuremberg and Würzburg.
+South Franconian is mainly spoken in northern Baden-Württemberg in Germany, but also in the northeasternmost part of the region of Alsace in France. While these dialects are considered as dialects of German in Baden-Württemberg, they are considered as dialects of Alsatian in Alsace (most Alsatian dialects are Low Alemannic, however). The largest cities in the South Franconian area are Karlsruhe and Heilbronn.
+The Upper German dialects are the Alemannic dialects in the west and the Bavarian dialects in the east.
+Alemannic dialects are spoken in Switzerland (High Alemannic in the densely populated Swiss Plateau, in the south also Highest Alemannic, and Low Alemannic in Basel), Baden-Württemberg (Swabian and Low Alemannic, in the southwest also High Alemannic), Bavarian Swabia (Swabian, in the southwesternmost part also Low Alemannic), Vorarlberg (Low, High, and Highest Alemannic), Alsace (Low Alemannic, in the southernmost part also High Alemannic), Liechtenstein (High and Highest Alemannic), and in the Tyrolean district of Reutte (Swabian). The Alemannic dialects are considered as Alsatian in Alsace. The largest cities in the Alemannic area are Stuttgart and Zürich.
+Bavarian dialects are spoken in Austria (Vienna, Lower and Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, Burgenland, and in most parts of Tyrol), Bavaria (Upper and Lower Bavaria as well as Upper Palatinate), South Tyrol, southwesternmost Saxony (Southern Vogtlandian), and in the Swiss village of Samnaun. The largest cities in the Bavarian area are Vienna and Munich.
+German is a fusional language with a moderate degree of inflection, with three grammatical genders; as such, there can be a large number of words derived from the same root.
+German nouns inflect by case, gender, and number:
+This degree of inflection is considerably less than in Old High German and other old Indo-European languages such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, and it is also somewhat less than, for instance, Old English, modern Icelandic, or Russian. The three genders have collapsed in the plural. With four cases and three genders plus plural, there are 16 permutations of case and gender/number of the article (not the nouns), but there are only six forms of the definite article, which together cover all 16 permutations. In nouns, inflection for case is required in the singular for strong masculine and neuter nouns only in the genitive and in the dative (only in fixed or archaic expressions), and even this is losing ground to substitutes in informal speech.[69] The singular dative noun ending is considered archaic or at least old-fashioned in almost all contexts and is almost always dropped in writing, except in poetry, songs, proverbs, and other petrified forms. Weak masculine nouns share a common case ending for genitive, dative, and accusative in the singular. Feminine nouns are not declined in the singular. The plural has an inflection for the dative. In total, seven inflectional endings (not counting plural markers) exist in German: -s, -es, -n, -ns, -en, -ens, -e.
+In German orthography, nouns and most words with the syntactical function of nouns are capitalised to make it easier for readers to determine the function of a word within a sentence (Am Freitag ging ich einkaufen. – "On Friday I went shopping."; Eines Tages kreuzte er endlich auf. – "One day he finally showed up.") This convention is almost unique to German today (shared perhaps only by the closely related Luxembourgish language and several insular dialects of the North Frisian language), but it was historically common in other languages such as Danish (which abolished the capitalization of nouns in 1948) and English.
+Like the other Germanic languages, German forms noun compounds in which the first noun modifies the category given by the second: Hundehütte ("dog hut"; specifically: "dog kennel"). Unlike English, whose newer compounds or combinations of longer nouns are often written "open" with separating spaces, German (like some other Germanic languages) nearly always uses the "closed" form without spaces, for example: Baumhaus ("tree house"). Like English, German allows arbitrarily long compounds in theory (see also English compounds). The longest German word verified to be actually in (albeit very limited) use is Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, which, literally translated, is "beef labelling supervision duties assignment law" [from Rind (cattle), Fleisch (meat), Etikettierung(s) (labelling), Überwachung(s) (supervision), Aufgaben (duties), Übertragung(s) (assignment), Gesetz (law)]. However, examples like this are perceived by native speakers as excessively bureaucratic, stylistically awkward, or even satirical.
+The inflection of standard German verbs includes:
+The meaning of basic verbs can be expanded and sometimes radically changed through the use of a number of prefixes. Some prefixes have a specific meaning; the prefix zer- refers to destruction, as in zerreißen (to tear apart), zerbrechen (to break apart), zerschneiden (to cut apart). Other prefixes have only the vaguest meaning in themselves; ver- is found in a number of verbs with a large variety of meanings, as in versuchen (to try) from suchen (to seek), vernehmen (to interrogate) from nehmen (to take), verteilen (to distribute) from teilen (to share), verstehen (to understand) from stehen (to stand).
+Other examples include the following:
+haften (to stick), verhaften (to detain); kaufen (to buy), verkaufen (to sell); hören (to hear), aufhören (to cease); fahren (to drive), erfahren (to experience).
+Many German verbs have a separable prefix, often with an adverbial function. In finite verb forms, it is split off and moved to the end of the clause and is hence considered by some to be a "resultative particle". For example, mitgehen, meaning "to go along", would be split, giving Gehen Sie mit? (Literal: "Go you with?"; Idiomatic: "Are you going along?").
+Indeed, several parenthetical clauses may occur between the prefix of a finite verb and its complement (ankommen = to arrive, er kam an = he arrived, er ist angekommen = he has arrived):
+A selectively literal translation of this example to illustrate the point might look like this:
+German word order is generally with the V2 word order restriction and also with the SOV word order restriction for main clauses. For polar questions, exclamations, and wishes, the finite verb always has the first position. In subordinate clauses, the verb occurs at the very end.
+German requires a verbal element (main verb or auxiliary verb) to appear second in the sentence. The verb is preceded by the topic of the sentence. The element in focus appears at the end of the sentence. For a sentence without an auxiliary, these are several possibilities:
+The position of a noun in a German sentence has no bearing on its being a subject, an object or another argument. In a declarative sentence in English, if the subject does not occur before the predicate, the sentence could well be misunderstood.
+However, German's flexible word order allows one to emphasise specific words:
+Normal word order:
+Object in front:
+Adverb of time in front:
+Both time expressions in front:
+Another possibility:
+Swapped adverbs:
+Swapped object:
+The flexible word order also allows one to use language "tools" (such as poetic meter and figures of speech) more freely.
+When an auxiliary verb is present, it appears in second position, and the main verb appears at the end. This occurs notably in the creation of the perfect tense. Many word orders are still possible:
+The main verb may appear in first position to put stress on the action itself. The auxiliary verb is still in second position.
+Sentences using modal verbs place the infinitive at the end. For example, the English sentence "Should he go home?" would be rearranged in German to say "Should he (to) home go?" (Soll er nach Hause gehen?). Thus, in sentences with several subordinate or relative clauses, the infinitives are clustered at the end. Compare the similar clustering of prepositions in the following (highly contrived) English sentence: "What did you bring that book that I do not like to be read to out of up for?"
+German subordinate clauses have all verbs clustered at the end. Given that auxiliaries encode future, passive, modality, and the perfect, very long chains of verbs at the end of the sentence can occur. In these constructions, the past participle formed with ge- is often replaced by the infinitive.
+The order at the end of such strings is subject to variation, but the second one in the last example is unusual.
+Most German vocabulary is derived from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.[70] However, there is a significant amount of loanwords from other languages, in particular Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and most recently English.[71] In the early 19th century, Joachim Heinrich Campe estimated that one fifth of the total German vocabulary was of French or Latin origin.[72]
+Latin words were already imported into the predecessor of the German language during the Roman Empire and underwent all the characteristic phonetic changes in German. Their origin is thus no longer recognizable for most speakers (e.g. Pforte, Tafel, Mauer, Käse, Köln from Latin porta, tabula, murus, caseus, Colonia). Borrowing from Latin continued after the fall of the Roman Empire during Christianization, mediated by the church and monasteries. Another important influx of Latin words can be observed during Renaissance humanism. In a scholarly context, the borrowings from Latin have continued until today, in the last few decades often indirectly through borrowings from English. During the 15th to 17th centuries, the influence of Italian was great, leading to many Italian loanwords in the fields of architecture, finance, and music. The influence of the French language in the 17th to 19th centuries resulted in an even greater import of French words. The English influence was already present in the 19th century, but it did not become dominant until the second half of the 20th century.
+Thus, Notker Labeo was able to translate Aristotelian treatises into pure (Old High) German in the decades after the year 1000.[73] The tradition of loan translation was revitalized in the 18th century with linguists like Joachim Heinrich Campe, who introduced close to 300 words that are still used in modern German. Even today, there are movements that try to promote the Ersatz (substitution) of foreign words that are deemed unnecessary with German alternatives.[74] It is claimed that this would also help in spreading modern or scientific notions among the less educated and as well democratise public life.
+As in English, there are many pairs of synonyms due to the enrichment of the Germanic vocabulary with loanwords from Latin and Latinized Greek. These words often have different connotations from their Germanic counterparts and are usually perceived as more scholarly.
+The size of the vocabulary of German is difficult to estimate. The Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) initiated by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm already contained over 330,000 headwords in its first edition. The modern German scientific vocabulary is estimated at nine million words and word groups (based on the analysis of 35 million sentences of a corpus in Leipzig, which as of July 2003 included 500 million words in total).[75]
+The Duden is the de facto official dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880. The Duden is updated regularly, with new editions appearing every four or five years. As of August 2017[update], it was in its 27th edition and in 12 volumes, each covering different aspects such as loanwords, etymology, pronunciation, synonyms, and so forth.The first of these volumes, Die deutsche Rechtschreibung (German Orthography), has long been the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The Duden has become the bible of the German language, being the definitive set of rules regarding grammar, spelling and usage of German.[76]
+The Österreichisches Wörterbuch ("Austrian Dictionary"), abbreviated ÖWB, is the official dictionary of the German language in the Republic of Austria. It is edited by a group of linguists under the authority of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture (German: Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur). It is the Austrian counterpart to the German Duden and contains a number of terms unique to Austrian German or more frequently used or differently pronounced there.[77] A considerable amount of this "Austrian" vocabulary is also common in Southern Germany, especially Bavaria, and some of it is used in Switzerland as well. Since the 39th edition in 2001 the orthography of the ÖWB has been adjusted to the German spelling reform of 1996. The dictionary is also officially used in the Italian province of South Tyrol.
+This is a selection of cognates in both English and German. Instead of the usual infinitive ending -en, German verbs are indicated by a hyphen after their stems. Words that are written with capital letters in German are nouns.
+German is written in the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with an umlaut mark, namely ä, ö and ü, as well as the eszett or scharfes s (sharp s): ß. In Switzerland and Liechtenstein, ss is used instead of ß. Since ß can never occur at the beginning of a word, it has no traditional uppercase form.
+Written texts in German are easily recognisable as such by distinguishing features such as umlauts and certain orthographical features – German is the only major language that capitalizes all nouns, a relic of a widespread practice in Northern Europe in the early modern era (including English for a while, in the 1700s) – and the frequent occurrence of long compounds. Because legibility and convenience set certain boundaries, compounds consisting of more than three or four nouns are almost exclusively found in humorous contexts. (In contrast, although English can also string nouns together, it usually separates the nouns with spaces. For example, "toilet bowl cleaner".)
+Before the German orthography reform of 1996, ß replaced ss after long vowels and diphthongs and before consonants, word-, or partial-word endings. In reformed spelling, ß replaces ss only after long vowels and diphthongs.
+Since there is no traditional capital form of ß, it was replaced by SS when capitalization was required. For example, Maßband (tape measure) became MASSBAND in capitals. An exception was the use of ß in legal documents and forms when capitalizing names. To avoid confusion with similar names, lower case ß was maintained (thus "KREßLEIN" instead of "KRESSLEIN"). Capital ß (ẞ) was ultimately adopted into German orthography in 2017, ending a long orthographic debate (thus "KREẞLEIN and KRESSLEIN").[78]
+Umlaut vowels (ä, ö, ü) are commonly transcribed with ae, oe, and ue if the umlauts are not available on the keyboard or other medium used. In the same manner ß can be transcribed as ss. Some operating systems use key sequences to extend the set of possible characters to include, amongst other things, umlauts; in Microsoft Windows this is done using Alt codes. German readers understand these transcriptions (although they appear unusual), but they are avoided if the regular umlauts are available, because they are a makeshift and not proper spelling. (In Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein, city and family names exist where the extra e has a vowel lengthening effect, e.g. Raesfeld [ˈraːsfɛlt], Coesfeld [ˈkoːsfɛlt] and Itzehoe [ɪtsəˈhoː], but this use of the letter e after a/o/u does not occur in the present-day spelling of words other than proper nouns.)
+There is no general agreement on where letters with umlauts occur in the sorting sequence. Telephone directories treat them by replacing them with the base vowel followed by an e. Some dictionaries sort each umlauted vowel as a separate letter after the base vowel, but more commonly words with umlauts are ordered immediately after the same word without umlauts. As an example in a telephone book Ärzte occurs after Adressenverlage but before Anlagenbauer (because Ä is replaced by Ae). In a dictionary Ärzte comes after Arzt, but in some dictionaries Ärzte and all other words starting with Ä may occur after all words starting with A. In some older dictionaries or indexes, initial Sch and St are treated as separate letters and are listed as separate entries after S, but they are usually treated as S+C+H and S+T.
+Written German also typically uses an alternative opening inverted comma (quotation mark) as in "Guten Morgen!".
+Until the early 20th century, German was mostly printed in blackletter typefaces (mostly in Fraktur, but also in Schwabacher) and written in corresponding handwriting (for example Kurrent and Sütterlin). These variants of the Latin alphabet are very different from the serif or sans-serif Antiqua typefaces used today, and the handwritten forms in particular are difficult for the untrained to read. The printed forms, however, were claimed by some to be more readable when used for Germanic languages.[79] (Often, foreign names in a text were printed in an Antiqua typeface even though the rest of the text was in Fraktur.) The Nazis initially promoted Fraktur and Schwabacher because they were considered Aryan, but they abolished them in 1941, claiming that these letters were Jewish.[80] It is also believed that the Nazi régime had banned this script as they realized that Fraktur would inhibit communication in the territories occupied during World War II.[81]
+The Fraktur script however remains present in everyday life in pub signs, beer brands and other forms of advertisement, where it is used to convey a certain rusticality and antiquity.
+A proper use of the long s (langes s), ſ, is essential for writing German text in Fraktur typefaces. Many Antiqua typefaces also include the long s. A specific set of rules applies for the use of long s in German text, but nowadays it is rarely used in Antiqua typesetting. Any lower case "s" at the beginning of a syllable would be a long s, as opposed to a terminal s or short s (the more common variation of the letter s), which marks the end of a syllable; for example, in differentiating between the words Wachſtube (guard-house) and Wachstube (tube of polish/wax). One can easily decide which "s" to use by appropriate hyphenation, (Wach-ſtube vs. Wachs-tube). The long s only appears in lower case.
+The orthography reform of 1996 led to public controversy and considerable dispute. The states (Bundesländer) of North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria refused to accept it. At one point, the dispute reached the highest court, which quickly dismissed it, claiming that the states had to decide for themselves and that only in schools could the reform be made the official rule – everybody else could continue writing as they had learned it. After 10 years, without any intervention by the federal parliament, a major revision was installed in 2006, just in time for the coming school year. In 2007, some traditional spellings were finally invalidated; however, in 2008, many of the old comma rules were again put in force.
+The most noticeable change was probably in the use of the letter ß, called scharfes s (Sharp S) or ess-zett (pronounced ess-tsett). Traditionally, this letter was used in three situations:
+Examples are Füße, paßt, and daß. Currently, only the first rule is in effect, making the correct spellings Füße, passt, and dass. The word Fuß 'foot' has the letter ß because it contains a long vowel, even though that letter occurs at the end of a syllable. The logic of this change is that an 'ß' is a single letter whereas 'ss' are two letters, so the same distinction applies as (for example) between the words den and denn.
+In German, vowels (excluding diphthongs; see below) are either short or long, as follows:
+Short /ɛ/ is realized as [ɛ] in stressed syllables (including secondary stress), but as [ə] in unstressed syllables. Note that stressed short /ɛ/ can be spelled either with e or with ä (for instance, hätte 'would have' and Kette 'chain' rhyme). In general, the short vowels are open and the long vowels are close. The one exception is the open /ɛː/ sound of long Ä; in some varieties of standard German, /ɛː/ and /eː/ have merged into [eː], removing this anomaly. In that case, pairs like Bären/Beeren 'bears/berries' or Ähre/Ehre 'spike (of wheat)/honour' become homophonous (see: Captain Bluebear).
+In many varieties of standard German, an unstressed /ɛr/ is not pronounced [ər] but vocalised to [ɐ].
+Whether any particular vowel letter represents the long or short phoneme is not completely predictable, although the following regularities exist:
+Both of these rules have exceptions (e.g. hat [hat] "has" is short despite the first rule; Mond [moːnt] "moon" is long despite the second rule). For an i that is neither in the combination ie (making it long) nor followed by a double consonant or cluster (making it short), there is no general rule. In some cases, there are regional differences. In central Germany (Hesse), the o in the proper name "Hoffmann" is pronounced long, whereas most other Germans would pronounce it short. The same applies to the e in the geographical name "Mecklenburg" for people in that region. The word Städte "cities" is pronounced with a short vowel [ˈʃtɛtə] by some (Jan Hofer, ARD Television) and with a long vowel [ˈʃtɛːtə] by others (Marietta Slomka, ZDF Television). Finally, a vowel followed by ch can be short (Fach [fax] "compartment", Küche [ˈkʏçə] "kitchen") or long (Suche [ˈzuːxə] "search", Bücher [ˈbyːçɐ] "books") almost at random. Thus, Lache is homographous between [laːxə] Lache "puddle" and [laxə] Lache "manner of laughing" (colloquial) or lache! "laugh!" (imperative).
+German vowels can form the following digraphs (in writing) and diphthongs (in pronunciation); note that the pronunciation of some of them (ei, äu, eu) is very different from what one would expect when considering the component letters:
+Additionally, the digraph ie generally represents the phoneme /iː/, which is not a diphthong. In many varieties, an /r/ at the end of a syllable is vocalised. However, a sequence of a vowel followed by such a vocalised /r/ is not a phonemic diphthong: Bär [bɛːɐ̯] "bear", er [eːɐ̯] "he", wir [viːɐ̯] "we", Tor [toːɐ̯] "gate", kurz [kʊɐ̯ts] "short", Wörter [vœɐ̯tɐ] "words".
+In most varieties of standard German, syllables that begin with a vowel are preceded by a glottal stop [ʔ].
+With approximately 26 phonemes, the German consonant system exhibits an average number of consonants in comparison with other languages. One of the more noteworthy ones is the unusual affricate /p͡f/. The consonant inventory of the standard language is shown below.
+German does not have any dental fricatives (as English th). The th sound, which the English language still has, disappeared on the continent in German with the consonant shifts between the 8th and 10th centuries.[83] It is sometimes possible to find parallels between English and German by replacing the English th with d in German: "Thank" → in German Dank, "this" and "that" → dies and das, "thou" (old 2nd person singular pronoun) → du, "think" → denken, "thirsty" → durstig and many other examples.
+Likewise, the gh in Germanic English words, pronounced in several different ways in modern English (as an f or not at all), can often be linked to German ch: "to laugh" → lachen, "through" → durch, "high" → hoch, "naught" → nichts, "light" → leicht or Licht, "sight" → Sicht, "daughter" → Tochter, "neighbour" → Nachbar.
+The German language is used in German literature and can be traced back to the Middle Ages, with the most notable authors of the period being Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
+The Nibelungenlied, whose author remains unknown, is also an important work of the epoch. The fairy tales collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century became famous throughout the world.
+Reformer and theologian Martin Luther, who was the first to translate the Bible into German, is widely credited for having set the basis for the modern "High German" language. Among the best-known poets and authors in German are Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hoffmann, Brecht, Heine, and Kafka. Fourteen German-speaking people have won the Nobel Prize in literature: Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Spitteler, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, Elias Canetti, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller and Peter Handke, making it the second most awarded linguistic region (together with French) after English.
+English has taken many loanwords from German, often without any change of spelling (aside from frequently eliminating umlauts and not capitalizing nouns):
+Several organisations promote the use and learning of the German language:
+The government-backed Goethe-Institut[85] (named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) aims to enhance the knowledge of German culture and language within Europe and the rest of the world. This is done by holding exhibitions and conferences with German-related themes, and providing training and guidance in the learning and use of the German language. For example, the Goethe-Institut teaches the Goethe-Zertifikat German language qualification.
+The Dortmund-based Verein Deutsche Sprache (VDS), founded in 1997, supports the German language and is the largest language association of citizens in the world. The VDS has more than thirty-five thousand members in over seventy countries. Its founder, statistics professor Dr. Walter Krämer, has remained chairperson of the association from its formation.[86]
+The German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle provides radio and television broadcasts in German and 30 other languages across the globe.[87] Its German language services are spoken slowly and thus tailored for learners. Deutsche Welle also provides an e-learning website for teaching German.

en/2197.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,69 @@

+The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify (except for "invariant sections") a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100), the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.
+The GFDL was designed for manuals, textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, and documentation which often accompanies GNU software. However, it can be used for any text-based work, regardless of subject matter. For example, the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia uses the GFDL[1] (coupled with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License) for all of its text.
+The GFDL was released in draft form for feedback in September 1999.[2] After revisions, version 1.1 was issued in March 2000, version 1.2 in November 2002, and version 1.3 in November 2008. The current state of the license is version 1.3.[3]
+The first discussion draft of the GNU Free Documentation License version 2 was released on September 26, 2006, along with a draft of the new GNU Simpler Free Documentation License.
+On December 1, 2007, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that a long period of discussion and negotiation between and amongst the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation and others had produced a proposal supported by both the FSF and Creative Commons to modify the Free Documentation License in such a fashion as to allow the possibility for the Wikimedia Foundation to migrate the projects to the similar Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) license.[4][5] These changes were implemented on version 1.3 of the license, which includes a new provision allowing certain materials released under the license to be used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license also.[3]
+Material licensed under the current version of the license can be used for any purpose, as long as the use meets certain conditions.
+The license explicitly separates any kind of "Document" from "Secondary Sections", which may not be integrated with the Document, but exist as front-matter materials or appendices. Secondary sections can contain information regarding the author's or publisher's relationship to the subject matter, but not any subject matter itself. While the Document itself is wholly editable, and is essentially covered by a license equivalent to (but mutually incompatible with) the GNU General Public License, some of the secondary sections have various restrictions designed primarily to deal with proper attribution to previous authors.
+Specifically, the authors of prior versions have to be acknowledged and certain "invariant sections" specified by the original author and dealing with his or her relationship to the subject matter may not be changed. If the material is modified, its title has to be changed (unless the prior authors give permission to retain the title).
+The license also has provisions for the handling of front-cover and back-cover texts of books, as well as for "History", "Acknowledgements", "Dedications" and "Endorsements" sections. These features were added in part to make the license more financially attractive to commercial publishers of software documentation, some of whom were consulted during the drafting of the GFDL.[6][7] "Endorsements" sections are intended to be used in official standard documents, where distribution of modified versions should only be permitted if they are not labeled as that standard any more.[7]
+The GFDL requires the ability to "copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially" and therefore is incompatible with material that excludes commercial re-use. As mentioned above, the GFDL was designed with commercial publishers in mind, as Stallman explained:
+The GFDL is meant as a way to enlist commercial publishers in funding free documentation without surrendering any vital liberty. The 'cover text' feature, and certain other aspects of the license that deal with covers, title page, history, and endorsements, are included to make the license appealing to commercial publishers for books whose authors are paid.[6]
+Material that restricts commercial re-use is incompatible with the license and cannot be incorporated into the work. However, incorporating such restricted material may be fair use under United States copyright law (or fair dealing in some other countries) and does not need to be licensed to fall within the GFDL if such fair use is covered by all potential subsequent uses. One example of such liberal and commercial fair use is parody.
+Although the two licenses work on similar copyleft principles, the GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
+However, at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation,[3] version 1.3 added a time-limited section allowing specific types of websites using the GFDL to additionally offer their work under the CC BY-SA license. These exemptions allow a GFDL-based collaborative project with multiple authors to transition to the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, without first obtaining the permission of every author, if the work satisfies several conditions:[3]
+To prevent the clause from being used as a general compatibility measure, the license itself only allowed the change to occur before August 1, 2009. At the release of version 1.3, the FSF stated that all content added before November 1, 2008 to Wikipedia as an example satisfied the conditions. The Wikimedia Foundation itself after a public referendum, invoked this process to dual-license content released under the GFDL under the CC BY-SA license in June 2009, and adopted a foundation-wide attribution policy for the use of content from Wikimedia Foundation projects.[8][9][10]
+There have currently been no cases involving the GFDL in a court of law, although its sister license for software, the GNU General Public License, has been successfully enforced in such a setting.[11] Although the content of Wikipedia has been plagiarized and used in violation of the GFDL by other sites, such as Baidu Baike, no contributors have ever tried to bring an organization to court due to violation of the GFDL. In the case of Baidu, Wikipedia representatives asked the site and its contributors to respect the terms of the licenses and to make  proper attributions.[12]
+Some critics consider the GFDL a non-free license. Some reasons for this are that the GFDL allows "invariant" text which cannot be modified or removed, and that its prohibition against digital rights management (DRM) systems applies to valid usages, like for "private copies made and not distributed".[13]
+Notably, the Debian project,[14] Thomas Bushnell,[15] Nathanael Nerode,[16] and Bruce Perens[17] have raised objections. Bruce Perens saw the GFDL even outside the "Free Software ethos":[17]
+"FSF, a Free Software organization, isn't being entirely true to the Free Software ethos while it is promoting a license that allows invariant sections to be applied to anything but the license text and attribution. [...] the GFDL isn't consistent with the ethos that FSF has promoted for 19 years."
+In 2006, Debian developers voted to consider works licensed under the GFDL to comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines provided the invariant section clauses are not used.[18] The results was GFDL without invariant sections is DFSG compliant.[18] However, their resolution stated that even without invariant sections, GFDL-licensed software documentation "is still not free of trouble", namely because of its incompatibility with the major free software licenses.[18]
+Those opposed to the GFDL have recommended the use of alternative licenses such as the BSD License or the GNU GPL.[18]
+The FLOSS Manuals foundation, an organization devoted to creating manuals for free software, decided to eschew the GFDL in favor of the GPL for its texts in 2007, citing the incompatibility between the two, difficulties in implementing the GFDL, and the fact that the GFDL "does not allow for easy duplication and modification", especially for digital documentation.[19]
+The GNU FDL contains the statement:
+You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.
+A criticism of this language is that it is too broad, because it applies to private copies made but not distributed. This means that a licensee is not allowed to save document copies "made" in a proprietary file format or using encryption.
+In 2003, Richard Stallman said about the above sentence on the debian-legal mailing list:[20]
+This means that you cannot publish them under DRM systems to restrict the possessors of the copies. It isn't supposed to refer to use of encryption or file access control on your own copy. I will talk with our lawyer and see if that sentence needs to be clarified.
+A GNU FDL work can quickly be encumbered because a new, different title must be given and a list of previous titles must be kept. This could lead to the situation where there are a whole series of title pages, and dedications, in each and every copy of the book if it has a long lineage. These pages cannot be removed until the work enters the public domain after copyright expires.
+Richard Stallman said about invariant sections on the debian-legal mailing list:[21]
+The goal of invariant sections, ever since the 80s when we first made the GNU Manifesto an invariant section in the Emacs Manual, was to make sure they could not be removed. Specifically, to make sure that distributors of Emacs that also distribute non-free software could not remove the statements of our philosophy, which they might think of doing because those statements criticize their actions.
+The GNU FDL is incompatible in both directions with the GPL—material under the GNU FDL cannot be put into GPL code and GPL code cannot be put into a GNU FDL manual.[22] At the June 22nd and 23rd 2006 international GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, Eben Moglen hinted that a future version of the GPL could be made suitable for documentation:[23]
+By expressing LGPL as just an additional permission on top of GPL we simplify our licensing landscape drastically. It's like for physics getting rid of a force, right? We just unified electro-weak, ok? The grand unified field theory still escapes us until the document licences too are just additional permissions on top of GPL. I don't know how we'll ever get there, that's gravity, it's really hard.
+The GNU FDL requires that licensees, when printing a document covered by the license, must also include "this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document". This means that if a licensee prints out a copy of an article whose text is covered under the GNU FDL, they must also include a copyright notice and a physical printout of the GNU FDL, which is a significantly large document in itself. Worse, the same is required for the standalone use of just one (for example, Wikipedia) image.[24] Wikivoyage, a web site dedicated to free content travel guides, chose not to use the GFDL because it considers it unsuitable for short printed texts.[25]
+Some of these were developed independently of the GNU FDL, while others were developed in response to perceived flaws in the GNU FDL.

en/2198.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,319 @@

+Coordinates: 7°49′N 1°03′W / 7.817°N 1.050°W / 7.817; -1.050
+Ghana (/ˈɡɑːnə/ (listen)), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean, in the subregion of West Africa. Spanning a land mass of 238,535 km2 (92,099 sq mi), Ghana is bordered by the Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, Togo in the east, and the Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic Ocean in the south. Ghana means "Warrior King" in the Soninke language.[9]
+The first permanent state in the territory of present-day Ghana dates back to the 11th century. Numerous kingdoms and empires emerged over the centuries, of which the most powerful was the Kingdom of Dagbon[10] and the Kingdom of Ashanti.[11] Beginning in the 15th century, the Portuguese Empire, followed by numerous other European powers, contested the area for trading rights, until the British ultimately established control of the coast by the late 19th century. Following over a century of native resistance, what are now Ghana's borders follow the lines of what were four separate British colonial territories: Gold Coast, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and British Togoland. Those were unified as an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth on 6 March 1957.[12][13][14]
+Ghana's population of approximately 30 million[15] spans a variety of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups.[4] According to the 2010 census, 71.2% of the population was Christian, 17.6% was Muslim, and 5.2% practised traditional faiths.[16] Its diverse geography and ecology ranges from coastal savannahs to tropical rain forests.
+Ghana is a unitary constitutional democracy led by a president who is both head of state and head of the government.[17] Ghana's growing economic prosperity and democratic political system have made it a regional power in West Africa.[18] It is a member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Group of 24 (G24) and the Commonwealth of Nations.[19]
+The etymology of the name Ghana means "Warrior King" and was the title accorded to the kings of the medieval Ghana Empire in West Africa, but the empire was further north than the modern nation of Ghana, in the region of Guinea.[20]
+Ghana was recognised as one of the great kingdoms in Bilad el-Sudan by the ninth century.[21]
+Ghana was inhabited in the Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery by a number of ancient predominantly Akan kingdoms in the Southern and Central territories. This included the Ashanti Empire, the Akwamu, the Bonoman, the Denkyira, and the Mankessim Kingdom.[22]
+Although the area of present-day Ghana in West Africa has experienced many population movements, the Akans were firmly settled by the 5th century CE.[23][24] By the early 11th century, the Akans were firmly established in the Akan state called Bonoman, for which the Brong-Ahafo Region is named.[23][25]
+From the 13th century, Akans emerged from what is believed to have been the Bonoman area, to create several Akan states of Ghana, mainly based on gold trading.[26] These states included Bonoman (Brong-Ahafo Region), Ashanti (Ashanti Region), Denkyira (Western North region), Mankessim Kingdom (Central region), and Akwamu (Eastern region).[23] By the 19th century, the territory of the southern part of Ghana was included in the Kingdom of Ashanti, one of the most influential states in sub-saharan Africa prior to the onset of colonialism.[23]
+The Kingdom of Ashanti government operated first as a loose network, and eventually as a centralised kingdom with an advanced, highly specialised bureaucracy centred in the capital city of Kumasi.[23] Prior to Akan contact with Europeans, the Akan people created an advanced economy based on principally gold and gold bar commodities then traded with the states of Africa.[23][27]
+The earliest known kingdoms to emerge in modern Ghana were the Mole-Dagbani states.[23] The Mole-Dagomba came on horseback from present-day Burkina Faso under a single leader, Naa Gbewaa.[28] With their advanced weapons and based on a central authority, they easily invaded and occupied the lands of the local people ruled by the Tendamba (land god priests), established themselves as the rulers over the locals, and made Gambaga their capital.[29] The death of Naa Gbewaa caused civil war among his children, some of whom broke off and founded separate states including Dagbon, Mamprugu, Mossi, Nanumba and Wala.[30][31]
+Akan trade with European states began after contact with the Portuguese in the 15th century.[32] Early European contact by the Portuguese people, who came to the Gold Coast region in the 15th century to trade and then established the Portuguese Gold Coast (Costa do Ouro), focused on the extensive availability of gold.[33] The Portuguese built a trading lodge at a coastal settlement called Anomansah (the perpetual drink) which they renamed São Jorge da Mina.[33]
+In 1481, King John II of Portugal commissioned Don Diego d'Azambuja to build the Elmina Castle, which was completed in three years.[33] By 1598, the Dutch had joined the Portuguese in the gold trade, establishing the Dutch Gold Coast (Nederlandse Bezittingen ter Kuste van Guinea) and building forts at Fort Komenda and Kormantsi.[34] In 1617, the Dutch captured the Olnini Castle from the Portuguese, and Axim in 1642 (Fort St Anthony).[34]
+Other European traders had joined in gold trading by the mid-17th century, most notably the Swedes, establishing the Swedish Gold Coast (Svenska Guldkusten), and Denmark-Norway, establishing the Danish Gold Coast (Danske Guldkyst or Dansk Guinea).[35] Portuguese merchants, impressed with the gold resources in the area, named it Costa do Ouro or Gold Coast.[35] Also beginning in the 17th century — in addition to the gold trade — Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French traders also participated in the Atlantic slave trade in this area.[36]
+More than thirty forts and castles were built by the Portuguese, Swedish, Dano-Norwegians, Dutch and German merchants; the latter Germans establishing the German Gold Coast (Brandenburger Gold Coast or Groß Friedrichsburg).[37] In 1874 Great Britain established control over some parts of the country, assigning these areas the status of British Gold Coast.[38] Many military engagements occurred between the British colonial powers and the various Akan nation-states. The Akan Kingdom of Ashanti defeated the British a few times in the 100-year-long Anglo-Ashanti wars but eventually lost with the War of the Golden Stool in the early 1900s.[39][40][41]
+In 1947, the newly formed United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) led by "The Big Six" called for "self-government within the shortest possible time" following the Gold Coast legislative election, 1946.[35][42] Kwame Nkrumah, a Ghanaian nationalist who led Ghana from 1957 to 1966 as the country's first Prime Minister and President, formed the Convention People's Party (CPP) in 1949 with the motto "self-government now".[35] The party initiated a "positive action" campaign involving non-violent protests, strikes and non-cooperation with the British authorities. Nkrumah was arrested and sentenced to one year imprisonment during this time. In the Gold Coast's February 1951 general election, he was elected to Parliament and released from prison to become leader of government business.[35] He became Prime Minister of the Gold Coast in 1952. His leadership was authoritarian but he improved the infrastructure of the country and his Africanisation policies created better career opportunities for Ghanaians.
+On 6 March 1957 at 12 midnight, the Gold Coast, Ashanti, the Northern Territories and British Togoland were unified as one single independent dominion within the British Commonwealth under the name Ghana. This was done under the Ghana Independence Act 1957. The current flag of Ghana, consisting of the colours red, gold, green, and a black star, dates back to this unification.[43] It was designed by Theodosia Salome Okoh; the red represents the blood that was shed towards independence, the gold represents the industrial minerals wealth of Ghana, the green symbolises the rich grasslands of Ghana, and the black star is the symbol of the Ghanaian people and African emancipation.[44]
+On 1 July 1960, following the Ghanaian constitutional referendum and Ghanaian presidential election, Nkrumah declared Ghana as a republic and assumed the presidency.[12][13][14][35] 6 March is the nation's Independence Day and 1 July is now celebrated as Republic Day.[45][46]
+At the time of independence Nkrumah declared, "My first objective is to abolish from Ghana poverty, ignorance, and disease. We shall measure our progress by the improvement in the health of our people; by the number of children in school, and by the quality of their education; by the availability of water and electricity in our towns and villages; and by the happiness which our people take in being able to manage their own affairs. The welfare of our people is our chief pride, and it is by this that the government will ask to be judged.".[47]
+Nkrumah was the first African head of state to promote the concept of Pan-Africanism, which he had been introduced to during his studies at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in the United States, at the time when Marcus Garvey was becoming famous for his "Back to Africa Movement".[35] Nkrumah merged the teachings of Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the naturalised Ghanaian scholar W. E. B. Du Bois into the formation of 1960s Ghana.[35]
+Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, as he became known, played an instrumental part in the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, and in establishing the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute to teach his ideologies of communism and socialism.[48] His life achievements were recognised by Ghanaians during his centenary birthday celebration, and the day was instituted as a public holiday in Ghana (Founder's Day).[49]
+The government of Nkrumah was subsequently overthrown by a coup by the Ghana Armed Forces codenamed "Operation Cold Chop". This occurred while Nkrumah was abroad with Zhou Enlai in the People's Republic of China, on a fruitless mission to Hanoi in Vietnam to help end the Vietnam War. The coup took place on 24 February 1966, led by Col. Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka. The National Liberation Council (NLC) was formed, chaired by Lt. General Joseph A. Ankrah.[50]
+A series of alternating military and civilian governments, often affected by economic instabilities,[51] ruled Ghana from 1966 to 1981, ending with the ascension to power of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in 1981.[52] These changes resulted in the suspension of the Constitution of Ghana in 1981, and the banning of political parties in Ghana.[53] The economy soon declined, so Rawlings negotiated a structural adjustment plan changing many old economic policies, and economic growth soon recovered during the mid-1980s.[53] A new Constitution of Ghana restoring multi-party system politics was promulgated in Ghanaian presidential election, 1992; Rawlings was elected as president of Ghana then, and again in Ghanaian general election, 1996.[54]
+Winning the 2000 Ghanaian elections, John Agyekum Kufuor of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was sworn into office as president of Ghana on 7 January 2001, and attained the presidency again in the 2004 Ghanaian elections, thus also serving two terms (the term limit) as president of Ghana and thus marking the first time under the fourth republic that power was transferred from one legitimately elected head of state and head of government to another.[54]
+Nana Akufo-Addo, the ruling party candidate, was defeated in a very close election by John Atta Mills of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) following the Ghanaian presidential election, 2008.[55][56] Mills died of natural causes and was succeeded by vice-president John Dramani Mahama on 24 July 2012.[57]
+Following the Ghanaian presidential election, 2012, John Dramani Mahama became President-elect and was inaugurated on 7 January 2013.[58] Ghana was a stable democracy.[54]
+As a result of the Ghanaian presidential election, 2016,[59] Nana Akufo-Addo became President-elect and was inaugurated as the fifth President of the Fourth Republic of Ghana and eighth President of Ghana on 7 January 2017.[60]
+Ghana is located on the Gulf of Guinea, only a few degrees north of the Equator, therefore giving it a warm climate.[61] Ghana spans an area of 238,535 km2 (92,099 sq mi), and has an Atlantic coastline that stretches 560 kilometres (350 miles) on the Gulf of Guinea in Atlantic Ocean to its south.[61] It lies between latitudes 4°45'N and 11°N, and longitudes 1°15'E and 3°15'W. The Prime Meridian passes through Ghana, specifically through the industrial port town of Tema.[61]
+Ghana is geographically closer to the "centre" of the Earth geographical coordinates than any other country; even though the notional centre, (0°, 0°) is located in the Atlantic Ocean approximately 614 km (382 mi) off the south-east coast of Ghana on the Gulf of Guinea.
+Grasslands mixed with south coastal shrublands and forests dominate Ghana, with forest extending northward from the south-west coast of Ghana on the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean 320 kilometres (200 miles) and eastward for a maximum of about 270 kilometres (170 miles) with the Kingdom of Ashanti or the southern part of Ghana being a primary location for mining of industrial minerals and timber.[61]
+Ghana encompasses plains, waterfalls, low hills, rivers, Lake Volta, the world's largest artificial lake, Dodi Island and Bobowasi Island on the south Atlantic Ocean coast of Ghana.[62] The northernmost part of Ghana is Pulmakong and the southernmost part of Ghana is Cape Three Points.[61]
+The climate of Ghana is tropical and there are two main seasons: the wet season and the dry season.
+Climate change in Ghana will have wide reaching impacts on the country. Because the country sits at the intersection of three hydro-climatic zones, the climate of Ghana is expected to become incredibly variable.[64] Based on a 20-year baseline climate observation, it is forecasted that maize and other cereal crop yields will reduce by 7% by 2050.  Available  data  also  shows  a  sea level rise of 2.1 mm per year over the last 30 years, indicating a rise of 5.8 cm, 16.5 cm  and  34.5 cm  by  2020,  2050  and 2080.
+Ghana is a unitary presidential constitutional democracy with a parliamentary multi-party system. Ghana alternated between civilian and military governments until January 1993, when the military government gave way to the Fourth Republic of Ghana after presidential and parliamentary elections in late 1992. The 1992 constitution of Ghana divides powers among a Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces (President of Ghana), parliament (Parliament of Ghana), cabinet (Cabinet of Ghana), council of state (Ghanaian Council of State), and an independent judiciary (Judiciary of Ghana). The Government of Ghana is elected by universal suffrage after every four years.[67]
+Nana Akufo-Addo won the Presidency in the Ghanaian general election held on 7 December 2016, defeating incumbent John Mahama. He was sworn in on 7 January 2017.
+The 2012 Fragile States Index indicated that Ghana is ranked the 67th least fragile state in the world and the 5th least fragile state in Africa after Mauritius, 2nd Seychelles, 3rd Botswana, and 4th South Africa. Ghana ranked 112th out of 177 countries on the index.[68] Ghana ranked as the 64th least corrupt and politically corrupt country in the world out of all 174 countries ranked and Ghana ranked as the 5th least corrupt and politically corrupt country in Africa out of 53 countries in the 2012 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index.[69][70] Ghana was ranked 7th in Africa out of 53 countries in the 2012 Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The Ibrahim Index is a comprehensive measure of African government, based on a number of different variables which reflect the success with which governments deliver essential political goods to its citizens.[71]
+Since independence, Ghana has been devoted to ideals of nonalignment and is a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Ghana favours international and regional political and economic co-operation, and is an active member of the United Nations and the African Union.[72]
+Ghana has a strong relationship with the United States. Three recent US presidents--Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—made diplomatic trips to Ghana. Many Ghanaian diplomats and politicians hold positions in international organisations, including Ghanaian diplomat and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, International Criminal Court Judge Akua Kuenyehia, and former President Jerry John Rawlings and former President John Agyekum Kuffour, who both served as diplomats of the United Nations.[67]
+In September 2010, Ghana's former President John Atta Mills visited China on an official visit. Mills and China's former President Hu Jintao, marked the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two nations, at the Great Hall of the People on 20 September 2010.[73] China reciprocated with an official visit in November 2011, by the Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of China, Zhou Tienong who visited Ghana and met with Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama.[74]
+The Islamic Republic of Iran and the 6th President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with the 12th President of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama on 16 April 2013 to hold discussions with President John Dramani Mahama on strengthening the Non-Aligned Movement and also co–chair a bilateral meeting between Ghana and Iran at the Ghanaian presidential palace Flagstaff House.[75][76][77][78][79] The Government of Ghana reciprocated with an official state visit on 5 August 2013 by the Vice-President of Ghana, Kwesi Amissah-Arthur, who met with the Vice-President of Iran, Eshaq Jahangiri on the basis of autarky and possible bilateral trade at the Islamic Republic of Iran's presidential palace, Sa'dabad Palace.[80]
+The Ghana Police Service (GPS) and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) are the main law enforcement agencies of the Republic of Ghana, and are responsible for the detection of crime, maintenance of law and order and the maintenance of internal peace and security.[81] The Ghana Police Service has eleven specialised police units including a Militarized police Rapid deployment force (RDF) and Marine Police Unit (MPU).[82][83] The Ghana Police Service operates in 12 divisions: ten covering the ten regions of Ghana, one assigned specifically to the seaport and industrial hub of Tema, and the twelfth being the Railways, Ports and Harbours Division.[83] The Ghana Police Service's Marine Police Unit and Division handles issues that arise from the country's offshore oil and gas industry.[83]
+The Ghana Prisons Service and the sub-division Borstal Institute for Juveniles administers incarceration in Ghana.[84] Ghana retains and exercises the death penalty for treason, corruption, robbery, piracy, drug trafficking, rape, and homicide.[85][86] 27 convicts (all men) were sentenced to death in Ghana in 2012 and the Ghana Prisons Service statistics of the total number of convicts sentenced to death in Ghana as of December 2012[update] was 162 men and 4 women,[85] with a total prison inmate population of 13,983 convicts as of 22 July 2013[update].[87] "The new sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations call for the international community to come together to promote the rule of law; support equal access to justice for all; reduce corruption; and develop effective, accountable, and transparent institutions at all levels."[88]
+Ghana is used as a key narcotics industry transshipment point by traffickers, usually from South America as well as some from other African nations.[89] In 2013, the UN chief of the Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) stated that "West Africa is completely weak in terms of border control and the big drug cartels from Colombia and Latin America have chosen Africa as a way to reach Europe."[90]
+There is not a wide or popular knowledge about the narcotics industry and intercepted narcotics within Ghana itself, due to the industry's operations and involvement in the underground economy.  The social context within which narcotic trafficking, storage, transportation, and repacking systems exist in Ghana and the state's location along the Gulf of Guinea within the Atlantic Ocean – only a few degrees north of the Equator – makes Ghana an attractive country for the narcotics business.[89][91]
+The Narcotics Control Board (NACOB) has impounded container ships at the Sekondi Naval Base in the Takoradi Harbour. These ships were carrying thousands of kilograms of cocaine, with a street value running into billions of Ghana cedis.  However, drug seizures saw a decline in 2011.[89][91]
+Drug cartels are using new methods in narcotics production and narcotics exportation, to avoid Ghanaian security agencies.[89][91] Underdeveloped institutions, porous open borders, and the existence of established smuggling organisations contribute to Ghana's position in the narcotics industry.[89][91] John Atta Mills, president between 2009 and 2012, initiated ongoing efforts to reduce the role of airports in Ghana's drug trade.[89]
+In 1957, the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) consisted of its headquarters, support services, three battalions of infantry and a reconnaissance squadron with armoured vehicles.[92] Ghanaian Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah aimed at rapidly expanding the GAF to support the United States of Africa ambitions. Thus in 1961, 4th and 5th Battalions were established, and in 1964 6th Battalion was established, from a parachute airborne unit originally raised in 1963.[93]
+Today, Ghana is a regional power and regional hegemon.[18] In his book Shake Hands with the Devil, Canadian Forces commander Roméo Dallaire highly rated the GAF soldiers and military personnel.[92]
+The military operations and military doctrine of the GAF are conceptualised on the Constitution of Ghana, Ghana's Law on Armed Force Military Strategy, and Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) agreements to which GAF is attestator.[94][95][96] GAF military operations are executed under the auspices and imperium of the Ministry of Defense (MoD) Minister for Defence.[94][97]
+Although Ghana is relatively peaceful and is often considered to be one of the least violent countries in the region, Ghana has experienced political violence in the past and 2017 has thus far seen an upward trend in incidents motivated by political grievances.[98]
+In 2017, Ghana signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.[99]
+Ghana is divided into 16 administrative regions, sub-divided into 275 districts:[100][101][102]
+Homosexual acts are prohibited by law in Ghana.[103] According to 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center, 96% of Ghanaians believe that homosexuality should not be accepted by society.[104] Sometimes old women in Ghana are accused of witchcraft, particularly in rural Ghana. Issues of witchcraft mainly remain as speculations based on superstitions within families. In some parts of northern Ghana, there exists what are called witch camps. This is said to house a total of around 1,000 people accused of witchcraft.[105] The Ghanaian government has announced that it intends to close the camps.[105]
+While women in Ghana are given equal rights under the constitution of Ghana, disparities in education, employment, and healthcare for women remain prevalent.
+Ghana is an average natural resource enriched country possessing industrial minerals, hydrocarbons and precious metals. It is an emerging designated digital economy with mixed economy hybridisation and an emerging market with 8.7% GDP growth in 2012. It has an economic plan target known as the "Ghana Vision 2020". This plan envisions Ghana as the first African country to become a developed country between 2020 and 2029 and a newly industrialised country between 2030 and 2039.[106] This excludes fellow Group of 24 member and Sub-Saharan African country South Africa, which is a newly industrialised country.[107] Ghana's economy also has ties to the Chinese yuan renminbi along with Ghana's vast gold reserves. In 2013, the Bank of Ghana began circulating the renminbi throughout Ghanaian state-owned banks and to the Ghana public as hard currency along with the national Ghana cedi for second national trade currency.[108]
+Between 2012 and 2013, 37.9 percent of rural dwellers were experiencing poverty whereas only 10.6 percent of urban dwellers were.[109] Urban areas hold greater opportunity for employment, particularly in informal trade, while nearly all (94 percent) of rural poor households participate in the agricultural sector.[110]
+The state-owned Volta River Authority and Ghana National Petroleum Corporation are the two major electricity producers.[111] The Akosombo Dam, built on the Volta River in 1965, along with Bui Dam, Kpong Dam, and several other hydroelectric dams provide hydropower.[112][113] In addition, the Government of Ghana has sought to build the second nuclear power plant in Africa.
+The Ghana Stock Exchange is the 5th largest on continental Africa and 3rd largest in sub-saharan Africa with a market capitalisation of GH¢ 57.2 billion or CN¥ 180.4 billion in 2012 with the South Africa JSE Limited as first.[114] The Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) was the 2nd best performing stock exchange in sub-saharan Africa in 2013.[115]
+Ghana also produces high-quality cocoa.[116] It is the 2nd largest producer of cocoa globally,[116][117] and was projected to become the world's largest producer of cocoa in 2015.[118]
+Ghana is classified as a middle income country.[6][119] Services account for 50% of GDP, followed by manufacturing (24.1%), extractive industries (5%), and taxes (20.9%).[111]
+The Ghana economy is an emerging digital-based mixed economy hybrid with an increasing primary manufacturing and export of digital technology goods along with assembling and exporting automobiles and ships, diverse resource rich exportation of industrial minerals, agricultural products primarily cocoa, petroleum and natural gas,[120] and industries such as information and communications technology primarily via Ghana's state digital technology corporation Rlg Communications which manufactures tablet computers with smartphones and various consumer electronics.[111][121]
+Ghana produces and exports an abundance of hydrocarbons such as sweet crude oil and natural gas.[122][123] The 100% state-owned filling station company of Ghana, Ghana Oil Company (GOIL) is the number 1 petroleum and gas filling station of Ghana and the 100% state-owned state oil company Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) oversees hydrocarbon exploration and production of Ghana's entire petroleum and natural gas reserves. Ghana aims to further increase output of oil to 2.2 million barrels (350,000 m3) per day and gas to 34,000,000 cubic metres (1.2×10^9 cu ft) per day.[124]
+Ghana's Jubilee Oilfield which contains up to 3 billion barrels (480,000,000 m3) of sweet crude oil was discovered in 2007, among the many other offshore and inland oilfields in Ghana.[125] Ghana is believed to have up to 5 billion barrels (790,000,000 m3) to 7 billion barrels (1.1×109 m3) of petroleum in reserves,[126] which is the fifth largest in Africa and the 21st to 25th largest proven reserves in the world. It also has up to 1.7×1011 cubic metres (6×10^12 cu ft) of natural gas in reserves,[127] which is the sixth largest in Africa and the 49th largest natural gas proven reserves in the world. Oil and gas exploration off Ghana's eastern coast on the Gulf of Guinea is ongoing, and the amount of both crude oil and natural gas continues to increase. The Government of Ghana has drawn up plans to nationalise Ghana's entire petroleum and natural gas reserves to increase government revenue.[128]
+Known for its industrial minerals, Ghana is the world's 7th largest producer of gold; producing over 102 metric tons of gold and the 10th largest producer of gold in the world in 2012; producing 89 metric tons of gold. Ghana is the 2nd largest producer of gold on the Africa continent behind South Africa.[129] Ghana has the 9th largest reserves, and is the 9th largest producer, of diamonds in the world.[citation needed] Industrial minerals and exports from South Ghana are gold, silver, timber, diamonds, bauxite, and manganese. South Ghana also has great deposits of barite, basalt, clay, dolomite, feldspar, granite, gravel, gypsum, iron ore, kaolin, laterite, limestone, magnesite, marble, mica, phosphates, phosphorus, rocks, salts, sand, sandstone, silver, slate, talc, and uranium that are yet to be fully exploited.[130] The Government of Ghana has drawn up plans to nationalise Ghana's entire mining industry to increase government revenues.[131][132]
+The real estate and housing market of Ghana has become an important and strategic economic sector, particularly in the urban centres of south Ghana such as Accra, Kumasi, Sekondi-Takoradi and Tema.[133][134][135] Kumasi is growing at a faster rate than Accra, and there is less competition in its real estate market.[133] The gross rental income tax of Ghana is withheld at 10%, capital gains are taxed at 15% with a 5% gift tax imposed on the transfer of properties and Ghana's real estate market is divided into 3 areas: public sector real estate development, emerging private sector real estate development, and private individuals.[133][134] The activities of these 3 groups are facilitated by the Ghanaian banks and the primary mortgage market which has demonstrated enormous growth potential.[134] Recent developments in the Ghanaian economy has given birth to a boom in the construction sector, including the housing and public housing sector generating and injecting billions of dollars annually into the Ghanaian economy.[133][134] The real estate market investment perspective and attraction comes from Ghana's tropical location and robust political stability.[133][134] An increasing number of the Ghanaian populace are investing in properties and the Ghana government is empowering the private sector in
+the real estate direction.[133][134]
+In July 2013, International Enterprise Singapore opened its 38th global office in Accra, to develop trade and investment on logistics, oil and gas, aviation, transportation and consumer sectors.[137] Singapore and Ghana also signed four bilateral agreements to promote public sector and private sector collaboration, as Ghana aims to predominantly shift its economic trade partnership to East Asia and Southeast Asia.[137] The economic centre is IE Singapore's second office in Africa, coming six months after opening in Johannesburg, South Africa in January 2013.[137] Ghana's labour force in 2008 totalled 11.5 million Ghanaian citizens.[138][139] Tema Harbour is Africa's largest manmade harbour and Takoradi Harbour along with Tema harbour in Ghana handles goods and exports for Ghana. They are also traffic junctions where goods are transhipped; the Tema harbour handles the majority of the nation's export cargo and most of the country's chief exports is shipped from Takoradi harbour.[140][141] The Takoradi harbour and Tema harbour are operated by the state-owned Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority.[140][141]
+Severe shortages of electricity in 2015 & 2016 led to dumsor (persistent, irregular and unpredictable electric power outages),[142] increasing the interest in renewables.[143] As of 2019, there is now a surplus of electricity which now presents a new set of financial challenges.[144]
+According to Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index of 2018, out of 180 countries, Ghana was ranked 78th, with a score of 41  on a scale where a 0–9 score means highly corrupt, and a 90–100 score means very clean. This was based on perceived levels of public sector corruption.[145]
+In 2013, out of 177 countries, Ghana was ranked 63rd with Cuba and Saudi Arabia with a score of 46.[146] Previously in 2012, the country ranked 64 and scored 45. Thus, Ghana's public sector scored lower in 2013 than in 2012, according to CPI's scores.
+Local reports have claimed that Ghana loses US$4.5 billion annually from nominal gross domestic product (Nominal GDP) growth as a result of economic corruption and economic crime by the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) government of Ghana led by John Dramani Mahama.[147] It is also said Ghana has lost an additional US$2.5 billion from nominal gross domestic product (Nominal GDP) growth between the months of January 2013 to October 2013 through economic corrupt practices under the Mahama administration.[148]
+The incumbent president is however seen to be fighting corruption by some government members,[149] and a fellow politician of an opposition party,[150] after ordering investigations into scandals. Nonetheless others believe his actions are not sufficient in some cases.[151]
+John Addo Kufuor, son of former President John Agyekum Kufuor, and Kojo Annan, son of former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, have been named in association with the Panama Papers.[152]
+Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African country to launch a cellular mobile network (1992). It was one of the first countries in Africa to be connected to the internet and to introduce ADSL broadband services.[153]
+The Ghana Space Science and Technology Centre (GSSTC) and Ghana Space Agency (GhsA) oversee the space exploration and space programmes of Ghana. GSSTC and GhsA worked to have a national security observational satellite launched into orbit in 2015.[154][155] The first practical step in its endeavor was a CanSat launched on 15 May 2013, a space programme spearheaded by the All Nations University College (ANUC) in Koforidua. The CanSat was deployed 200 metres (660 feet) high from a helium-filled balloon and took some aerial images as well as temperature readings. As its next step in advancing space science and satellite technology in the sub-region, an amateur ground station has been designed and built by the university. It has successfully tracked and communicated with several (amateur) radio satellites in orbit including the International Space Station, receiving slow-scan TV images on 18 and 20 December 2014. The miniaturized earth observational satellite is to be launched into orbit in 2017.[156]
+Ghana's annual space exploration expenditure has been 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP), to support research in science and technology. In 2012, Ghana was elected to chair the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (Comsats); Ghana has a joint effort in space exploration with South Africa's South African National Space Agency (SANSA).[154]
+The use of computer technology for teaching and learning began to receive government of Ghana's attention from the late 1990s.[157] The information and communications technology in education policy of Ghana requires the use of information and communications technology for teaching and learning at all levels of the education of Ghana system.[157] The Ministry of Education (MOE) supports institutions in teaching of information and communications technology literacy.[157] Majority of secondary, and some basic schools of Ghana have computer laboratories.[157]
+Ghana's intention to become the information technology hub of West Africa has led the government of Ghana to enact cyber crime legislation and enhance cyber security practices.[158] Acting on that goal, in 2008 Ghana passed the Electronic Communications Act and the Electronic Transactions Act, which established the legal framework for governing information technology.[158] In November 2011, the Deputy Minister for Communications and Technology announced the development of a national cyber security strategy, aimed at combating cyber crime and securing critical infrastructure.[158]
+In June 2012, the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) announced a national computer emergency response team "strategy" designed to co-ordinate government response to cyberattacks, both internal and external.[158] The agency also established computer emergency response teams for each municipal, metropolitan, and district assembly to improve co-ordination and information-sharing on cyberspace threats.[158] Ghana is ranked 2nd on continental Africa and 7th globally in cyber warfare, cyberterrorism, cyber crime, and internet crime.[159]
+The Centre for Scientific Research into Plant Medicine is an agency of the Ministry of Health that was set up in the 1970s for both R&D and as a practical resource (product production & distribution/provision) primarily in areas of biotechnology related to medicinal plants. This includes both herbal medicine and work on more advanced applications. It also has a secondary role as an educational resource for foreign students in health, biotechnology and related fields.
+Ghanaian education system is divided in three parts: Basic Education, secondary cycle, and tertiary education. "Basic Education" lasts 11 years (ages 4‒15).[160] It is divided into Kindergarten (2 years), Primary School (2 module of 3 years) and Junior High (3 years). Junior High School (JHS) ends with the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).[160][161] Once the BECE is achieved, the pupil can proceed to the secondary cycle.[162] Hence, the pupil has the choice between general education (offered by the Senior High School) and vocational education (offered by the technical Senior High School or the Technical and Vocational Institutes). Senior High School lasts three years and leads to the West African Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), which is a prerequisite for enrollment in a university bachelor's degree programme.[163] Polytechnics are open to vocational students, from SHS or TVI.[164]
+A Bachelor's degree usually requires four years of study. It can be followed by a one- or two-year master's degree programme, which can be followed by a three-year PhD programme[165] A polytechnic programme lasts two or three years.[164] Ghana also possesses numerous colleges of education.[166] The Ghanaian education system from kindergarten up to an undergraduate degree level generally takes 20 years.[167]
+The academic year usually goes from August to May inclusive.[168] The school year in primary education lasts 40 weeks in Primary School and SHS, and 45 weeks in JHS.[169]
+With over 95% of its children in school, Ghana currently has one of the highest school enrollment rates in all of Africa.[170][171] The ratio of females to males in the total education system was 0.98, in 2014.[172]
+Ghana's education system annually attracts a large number of foreign students particularly in the university sector.[173][174]
+The government largely funds basic education comprising public primary schools and public junior high schools. Senior high schools were subsidised by the government until September 2017/2018 academic year that senior high education became free.[175] At the higher education level, the government funds more than 80% of resources provided to public universities, polytechnics and teacher training colleges.
+As part of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education, Fcube, the government supplies all basic education schools with all their textbooks and other educational supplies like exercise books. Senior high schools are also provided with all their textbook requirement by the government. Private schools acquire their educational material from private suppliers.[176]
+The female and male ages 15–24 years literacy rate in Ghana was 81% in 2010, with males at 82%,[177] and females at 80%.[178]
+Ghanaian children begin their education at the age of three or four starting from kindergarten (nursery school and preschool), then to elementary school (primary school), high school (junior high school and senior high school) and finally university. The average age at which a Ghanaian child enters primary school is 6 years.[170]
+Ghana has a free education 6-year primary school education system beginning at age six,[179] and, under the educational reforms implemented in 1988 and reformed in 2007, they pass on to a 3-year junior high school system. At the end of the third year of junior high, there is a mandatory "Basic Education Certificate Examination". Those continuing must complete the 4-year senior high school programme (which has been changed to three years) and take an admission exam to enter any university or tertiary programme. The Ghanaian education system from nursery school up to an undergraduate degree level takes 20 years.[167]
+In 2005, Ghana had 12,130 primary schools, 5,450 junior secondary schools, 503 senior secondary schools, 21 public training colleges, 18 technical institutions, two diploma-awarding institutions and 6 universities.[180][181]
+In 2010, there were relatively more females (53.0%) than males (40.5%) with primary school and JSS (junior secondary school) / JHS (junior high school) as their highest level of education.[2]
+The Ghanaian Ministry of Education and the Ghanaian National Accreditation Board provide free education at the elementary school (primary school) level, and most Ghanaians have relatively easy access to high school education (junior high school and senior high school).[179] These numbers can be contrasted with the single university and handful of secondary and primary schools that existed at the time of independence in 1957. Ghana's spending on education has varied between 28–40% of its annual budget in the past decade. All teaching is done in English, mostly by qualified Ghanaian educators.[167]
+The courses taught at the primary or basic school level include English, Ghanaian language and culture, mathematics, environmental studies, social studies, Mandarin and French as an OIF associated-member,[182] integrated or general science, pre-vocational skills and pre-technical skills, religious and moral education, and physical activities such as Ghanaian music and dance, and physical education.[167]
+The senior high level school curriculum has core subjects and elective subjects of which students must take four the core subjects of English language, mathematics, integrated science (including science, agriculture and environmental studies) and social studies (economics, geography, history and government).[167]
+High school students also choose four elective subjects from five available programmes: agriculture programme, general programme (arts or science option), business programme, vocational programme and technical programme.[167] Apart from most primary and secondary schools which choose the Ghanaian system of schooling, there are also international schools such as the Takoradi International School, Tema International School, Galaxy International School, The Roman Ridge School, Lincoln Community School, Faith Montessori School, American International School, Alpha Beta Christian College, Ghana Christian International High School, Association International School, New Nation School, SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College, Vilac International School, Akosombo International School (which offers Cambridge O level certificate), North Legon Little Campus and International Community School, which offer the International Baccalaureat, Advanced Level General Certificate of Education and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE).[180]
+There are eight national public universities in Ghana: the University of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Cape Coast, University of Education, University for Development Studies, University of Mines and Technology, University of Professional Studies, Accra, University of Energy and Natural Resources, and University of Health and Allied Sciences.[183]
+Ghana has a growing number of accredited private universities including Lancaster University, Ghana, Ghana Technology University College, Ashesi University College, Methodist University College Ghana, Central University College, Accra Institute of Technology, Regent University College of Science and Technology, Valley View University, Catholic University College, Presbyterian university college, and Zenith University College.[184]
+The oldest university in Ghana, the University of Ghana, was founded in 1948. It had 29,754 students in 2008. Its programmes in the arts, humanities, business, and the social sciences, as well as medicine, are among the best in the country.[185][citation needed] Many universities—including Harvard University, Cornell University, and Oxford University—have special study-abroad programmes with Ghanaian schools and provide their students the opportunity to study abroad at Ghanaian universities. New York University has a campus in Accra.[186]
+The University of Ghana has seen a shift of its traditionally best students to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.[187] Since Ghana's independence, the country has been one of the most educational in sub-Saharan Africa. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been chancellor of the University of Ghana since 2008.[187]
+Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the second university to be established in the country, is the premier university of science and technology in Ghana and West Africa.[167]
+Ghana is a multiethnic country.[2] The largest ethnic group is the Ashanti people. Ghana's territorial area within West Africa was unoccupied and uninhabited by humans until the 10th century BC.[190] By the 10th century AD. The Guans were the first settlers in Ghana long before the other tribes came. Akans had established Bonoman (Brong Ahafo region) and were joined by the current settlers and inhabitants by the 16th century.
+In 2010, the population of Ghana was 72.2% Christian (24.3% Pentecostal, 18.4% Protestant, 13.1% Catholic and 11.4% other). Approximately 18.6% of the population of Ghana are Muslim,[17] (51% Sunni, 16% Ahmadiyya, and 8% Shia).[191][192] Just over 10,000 Ghanaians practice Hinduism, with most of them being indigenous converts. Hinduism in Ghana was popularized by Swami Ghana Nanda ji, who opened several temples in the nation. The temple of Lord Shiva in Accra is one of the largest where there are celebrations to Ganesh Chaturthi, Rath Yatra, and other Hindu observations.
+The Bahá’í religious community, established in Ghana in 1951, today includes more than 100 communities and over 50 local Bahá’í administrative councils, called Local Spiritual Assemblies.[193]
+As of 2014[update], there are 375,000 registered legal skilled workers (permanent residents) or foreign workers/students (i.e. Ghana Card holders) inhabitants with an annually 1.5 million transited airport layovers. In its first post-colonial census in 1960, Ghana had a population of 6.7 million.[194] The median age of Ghanaian citizens is 30 years old and the average household size is 3.6 persons. The Government of Ghana states that the official language of Ghana is English,[1] and is spoken by 67.1% of the inhabiting population of Ghana.[2]
+As of 22 June 2019[update], Ghana has a population of 30,083,000.[195] Around 29 percent of the population is under the age of 15, while persons aged 15–64 make up 57.8 percent of the population.[196] The Ashanti Region had the most, (Akan) (Ashanti) (4.7 million in Ashanti, 2.3 million in Brong-Ahafo, 2.2 million in Central, 2.6 million in Eastern, 2.3 million in Western, and 4 million in the seat of government in Greater Accra geographically and legally part of Eastern then administered separately on 23 July 1982).[191]
+As of 2010[update], 4.1 million persons reside in the Northern territories (2.4 million in Northern, 1 million in Upper East, and 0.7 million in Upper West).[191]
+As of 2010[update], 2.1 million persons reside in Ewe territory Volta.[191]
+Due to the recent legal immigration of skilled workers who possess Ghana Cards, there is a small population of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Middle Eastern and European nationals.
+In 2010, the Ghana Immigration Service reported a large number of economic migrants and Illegal immigrants inhabiting Ghana: 14.6% (or 3.1 million) of Ghana's 2010 population (predominantly Nigerians, Burkinabe citizens, Togolese citizens, and Malian citizens). In 1969, under the "Ghana Aliens Compliance Order" (GACO) enacted by the Prime Minister of Ghana Kofi Abrefa Busia;[197] Government of Ghana with BGU (Border Guard Unit) deported over 3,000,000 aliens and illegal immigrants in three months as they made up 20% of the population at the time.[197][198] In 2013, there was a mass deportation of illegal miners, more than 4,000 of them Chinese nationals.[199][200]
+English is the official language and lingua franca.[201][202]
+Additionally, there are eleven languages that have the status of government-sponsored languages:
+Of these, Akan is the most widely spoken.[205]
+Since Ghana is surrounded by French-speaking countries, French is widely taught in schools and universities, as well as a language used for commercial and international economic exchanges. Since 2006, Ghana has been an associate member of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie,[206] the global organisation that unites French-speaking countries (84 nations on 6 continents). In 2005, over 350 000 Ghanaian children studied French in schools. Since then, its status has progressively been updated to a mandatory language in every high school.[207]
+Ghana is a largely Christian country, although a sizable Muslim minority exists. Traditional (indigenous) beliefs are also practiced.
+The fertility rate of Ghana declined from 3.99 (2000) to 3.28 (2010) with 2.78 in urban region and 3.94 in rural region.[210] The United Nations reports a fertility decline from 6.95 (1970) to 4.82 (2000) to 3.93 live births per woman in 2017.[211]
+As of 2010[update], the maternal mortality rate was 350 deaths/100,000 live births, and the infant mortality rate was 38.52 deaths/1,000 live births.[208]  By 2018 the infant mortality rate had dropped to 37/1,000.[212]
+According to a 2013 UNICEF report,[213] 4% of women in Ghana have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice has been made illegal in the country.[214]
+Ghana is also the birth country of anti-FGM campaigner Efua Dorkenoo.
+Life expectancy at birth in 2018 was 64 for a female and 62 for a male.[212]
+The top ten causes of death in Ghana in 2018 were:[212]
+Crime in Ghana is investigated by the Ghana Police Service. Ghana had a murder rate of 1.68 per 100,000 population in 2011.[215]
+Ghana has a universal health care system strictly designated for Ghanaian nationals, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).[216] Health care is very variable throughout Ghana and in 2012, over 12 million Ghanaian nationals were covered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (Ghana) (NHIS).[217] Urban centres are well served, and contain most of the hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies in Ghana. There are over 200 hospitals in Ghana and Ghana is a destination for medical tourism.[218] In 2010, there were 0.1 physicians per 1,000 people and as of 2011[update], 0.9 hospital beds per 1,000 people.[196]
+The 2014 estimate of life expectancy at birth had increased to an average of 65.75 years with males at 63.4 years and females at 68.2 years,[219] and in 2013 infant mortality decreased to 39 per 1,000 live births.[220] Sources vary on life expectancy at birth; the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 62 years for men and 64 years for women born in 2016.[221]
+There was an estimation of 15 physicians and 93 nurses per 100,000 persons in 2010.[222] 5.2% of Ghana's GDP was spent on health in 2010,[223] and all Ghanaian citizens have the right to access primary health care.[224] In May 2020, the WHO announced Ghana became the second country in the WHO African Region to attain regulatory system "maturity level 3", the second-highest in the four-tiered WHO classification of National medicines regulatory systems.[225]
+As of 2012[update], the HIV/AIDS prevalence was estimated at 1.40% among adults aged 15–49.[226]
+Ghanaian culture is a diverse mixture of the practices and beliefs of many different Ghanaian ethnic groups. The 2010 census reported that the largest ethnic groups are the Akan (47.3 percent), the Mole-Dagbani (16.6 percent), the Ewe (13.9 percent), the Ga-Dangme (7.4 percent), the Gurma (5.7) and the Guan (3.7 percent).[210] The Akan make up a majority of the population in the Central (81.7 percent), Western (78.2 percent), Ashanti (74.2 percent), Brong Ahafo (58.9 percent) and Eastern (51.1 percent) regions.[210]
+Ghanaian cuisine and gastronomy is diverse, and includes an assortment of soups and stews with varied seafoods and most Ghanaian soups are prepared with vegetables, meat, poultry or fish.[227] Fish is important in the Ghanaian diet with tilapia, roasted and fried whitebait, smoked fish and crayfish all being common components of Ghanaian dishes.[227]
+Banku (Akple) is a common Ghanaian starchy food made from ground corn (maize),[227] and cornmeal based staples, kormi (kenkey) and banku (akple) are usually accompanied by some form of fried fish (chinam) or grilled tilapia and a very spicy condiment made from raw red and green chillies, onions and tomatoes (pepper sauce).[227] Banku and tilapia is a combo served in most Ghanaian restaurants.[227] Fufu is the most common exported Ghanaian dish in that it is a delicacy across the African diaspora.[227]
+The Ghanaian national literature radio programme and accompanying publication Voices of Ghana was one of the earliest on the African continent. The most prominent Ghanaian authors are novelists; J. E. Casely Hayford, Ayi Kwei Armah and Nii Ayikwei Parkes, who gained international acclaim with the books, Ethiopia Unbound (1911), The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Tail of the Blue Bird (2009), respectively.[228] In addition to novels, other literature arts such as Ghanaian theatre and poetry have also had a very good development and support at the national level with prominent Ghanaian playwrights and poets Joe de Graft and Efua Sutherland.[228]
+During the 13th century, Ghanaians developed their unique art of adinkra printing. Hand-printed and hand-embroidered adinkra clothes were made and used exclusively by the then Ghanaian royalty for devotional ceremonies. Each of the motifs that make up the corpus of adinkra symbolism has a name and meaning derived from a proverb, a historical event, human attitude, ethology, plant life-form, or shapes of inanimate and man-made objects. These are graphically rendered in stylised geometric shapes. The meanings of the motifs may be categorised into aesthetics, ethics, human relations, and concepts.[228]
+The Adinkra symbols have a decorative function as tattoos but also represent objects that encapsulate evocative messages that convey traditional wisdom, aspects of life or the environment. There are many different symbols with distinct meanings, often linked with proverbs. In the words of Anthony Appiah, they were one of the means in a pre-literate society for "supporting the transmission of a complex and nuanced body of practice and belief".[229]
+Along with the Adinkra cloth Ghanaians use many different cloth fabrics for their traditional attire.[230] The different ethnic groups have their own individual cloth. The most well known is the Kente cloth.[230] Kente is a very important Ghanaian national costume and clothing and these cloths are used to make traditional and modern Ghanaian Kente attire.[230]
+Different symbols and different colours mean different things.[230] Kente is the most famous of all the Ghanaian cloths.[230] Kente is a ceremonial cloth hand-woven on a horizontal treadle loom and strips measuring about 4 inches wide are sewn together into larger pieces of cloths.[230] Cloths come in various colours, sizes and designs and are worn during very important social and religious occasions.[230]
+In a cultural context, kente is more important than just a cloth and it is a visual representation of history and also a form of written language through weaving.[230] The term kente has its roots in the Akan word kɛntɛn which means a basket and the first kente weavers used raffia fibres to weave cloths that looked like kenten (a basket); and thus were referred to as kenten ntoma; meaning basket cloth.[230] The original Akan name of the cloth was nsaduaso or nwontoma, meaning "a cloth hand-woven on a loom"; however, "kente" is the most frequently used term today.[230]
+Contemporary Ghanaian fashion includes traditional and modern styles and fabrics and has made its way into the African and global fashion scene. The cloth known as African print fabric was created out of Dutch wax textiles, it is believed that in the late 1800s, Dutch ships on their way to Asia stocked with machine-made textiles that mimicked Indonesian Batik stopped at many West African ports on the way. The fabrics did not do well in Asia. However, in West Africa – mainly Ghana where there was an already established market for cloths and textiles – the client base grew and it was changed to include local and traditional designs, colours and patterns to cater to the taste of the new consumers.[231]
+Today outside of Africa it is called "Ankara" and it has a client base well beyond Ghana and Africa as a whole. It is very popular among Caribbean peoples and African Americans; celebrities such as Solange Knowles and her sister Beyoncé have been seen wearing African print attire.[232] Many designers from countries in North America and Europe are now using African prints and it has gained a global interest.[233] British luxury fashion house Burberry created a collection around Ghanaian styles.[234] American musician Gwen Stefani has repeatedly incorporated African prints into her clothing line and can often be seen wearing it.[235] Internationally acclaimed Ghanaian-British designer Ozwald Boateng introduced African print suits in his 2012 collection.[236]
+The music of Ghana is diverse and varies between different ethnic groups and regions. Ghanaian music incorporates several distinct types of musical instruments such as the talking drum ensembles, Akan Drum, goje fiddle and koloko lute, court music, including the Akan Seperewa, the Akan atumpan, the Ga kpanlogo styles, and log xylophones used in asonko music.[237] The most well known genres to have come from Ghana are African jazz, which was created by Ghanaian artist Kofi Ghanaba,[238] and its earliest form of secular music, called highlife.[237] Highlife originated in the late 19th century and early 20th century and spread throughout West Africa.[237] In the 1990s a new genre of music was created by the youth incorporating the influences of highlife, Afro-reggae, dancehall and hiphop.[237] This hybrid was called hiplife.[237] Ghanaian artists such as "Afro Roots" singer, activist and songwriter Rocky Dawuni, R&B and soul singer Rhian Benson and Sarkodie have had international success.[239][240] In December 2015, Rocky Dawuni became the first Ghanaian musician to be nominated for a Grammy award in the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album category for his 6th studio album titled Branches of The Same Tree[241] released 31 March 2015.
+Ghanaian dance is as diverse as its music, and there are traditional dances and different dances for different occasions.[242] The most known Ghanaian dances are those for celebrations. These dances include the Adowa, Kpanlogo, Azonto, Klama, Agbadza, Borborbor and Bamaya.[242]
+The Nana Otafrija Pallbearing Services, also known as the Dancing Pallbearers, come from the coastal town of Prampram in the Greater Accra Region of southern Ghana. The group of pallbearers were featured in a BBC feature story in 2017, and footage from the story became part of an Internet meme in the wake of the COVID-19 world pandemic. [243]
+Ghana has a budding and thriving film industry. Ghana's film industry dates as far back as 1948 when the Gold Coast Film Unit was set up in the Information Services Department.[244] Some internationally recognised films have come from Ghana. In 1970, I Told You So was one of the first Ghanaian films to receive international acknowledgement and received great reviews from The New York Times.[245] It was followed by the 1973 Ghanaian and Italian production The African Deal also known as "Contratto carnale" featuring Bahamian American actor Calvin Lockhart.[246] 1983's Kukurantumi: the Road to Accra, a Ghanaian and German production directed by King Ampaw, was written about by famous American film critic Vincent Canby.[247] In 1987, Cobra Verde, another Ghanaian and German production directed by Werner Herzog, received international acclamation and in 1988, Heritage Africa won more than 12 film awards.
+In recent times there have been collaborations between Ghanaian and Nigerian crew and cast and a number of productions turned out. Many Ghanaian films are co-produced with Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, and some are distributed by Nigerian marketers. Also, Nigerian filmmakers often feature Ghanaian actors and actresses in their movies and Ghanaian filmmakers feature Nigerian actors and actresses in theirs. Nadia Buari, Yvonne Nelson, Lydia Forson and Jackie Appiah all popular Ghanaian actresses and Van Vicker and Majid Michel both popular Ghanaian actors, have starred in many Nigerian movies. As a result of these collaborations, Western viewers often confuse Ghanaian movies with Nollywood and count their sales as one; however, they are two independent industries that sometimes share Nollywood. In 2009, Unesco described Nollywood as the second-biggest film industry in the world after Bollywood.[248]
+The media of Ghana are amongst the most free in Africa. Chapter 12 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana guarantees freedom of the press and independence of the media, while Chapter 2 prohibits censorship.[249] Post-independence, the government and media often had a tense relationship, with private outlets closed during the military governments and strict media laws that prevented criticism of government.[250]
+Press freedoms were restored in 1992, and after the election in 2000 of John Agyekum Kufuor the tensions between the private media and government decreased. Kufuor supported press freedom and repealed a libel law, but maintained that the media had to act responsibly.[251] The Ghanaian media has been described as "one of the most unfettered" in Africa, operating with little restriction. The private press often carries criticism of government policy.[252]
+Association football (or soccer) is the top spectator sport in Ghana and the national men's football team is known as the Black Stars, with the under-20 team known as the Black Satellites.[253] Ghana has won the African Cup of Nations four times, the FIFA U-20 World Cup once, and has participated in three consecutive FIFA World Cups  in 2006, 2010, and 2014.[253] In the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Ghana became the third African country to reach the quarter-final stage of the World Cup after Cameroon in 1990 and Senegal in 2002.[254] Ghana national U-20 football team, known as the Black Satellites, is considered to be the feeder team for the Ghana national football team. Ghana is the first and only country on the Africa continent to be crowned FIFA U-20 World Cup Champions,[253] and two-time runners up in 1993 and 2001. The Ghana national U-17 football team known as the Black Starlets are two-time FIFA U-17 World Cup champions in 1991 and 1995, two-time runners up in 1993 and 1997.[255]
+Ghanaian football teams Asante Kotoko SC and Accra Hearts of Oak SC are the 5th and 9th best football teams on the Africa continent and have won a total of five Africa continental association football and Confederation of African Football trophies; Ghanaian football club Asante Kotoko SC has been crowned two-time CAF Champions League winners in 1970, 1983 and five-time CAF Champions League runners up, and Ghanaian football club Accra Hearts of Oak SC has been crowned 2000 CAF Champions League winner and two-time CAF Champions League runners up, 2001 CAF Super Cup champions and 2004 CAF Confederation Cup champions.[256] The International Federation of Football History and Statistics crowned Asante Kotoko SC as the African club of the 20th century.[256] There are several club football teams in Ghana that play in the Ghana Premier League and Division One League, both administered by the Ghana Football Association.[257]
+Ghana competed in the Winter Olympics in 2010 for the first time. Ghana qualified for the 2010 Winter Olympics, scoring 137.5 International Ski Federation points, within the qualifying range of 120–140 points.[258]
+Ghanaian skier, Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, nicknamed "The snow leopard", became the first Ghanaian to take part in the Winter Olympics, at the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,[259] taking part in the slalom skiing.[260] Ghana finished 47th out of 102 participating nations, of whom 54 finished in the Alpine skiing slalom.[261][262] Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong broke on the international skiing circuit, being the second black African skier to do so.[263]
+Ghanaian athletes have won a total of four Olympics medals in thirteen appearances at the Summer Olympics, three in boxing, and a bronze medal in association football, and thus became the first country on the Africa continent to win a medal at association football.[264]
+Ghana competes in the Commonwealth Games, sending athletes in every edition since 1954 (except for the 1986 games). Ghana has won fifty-seven medals at the Commonwealth Games, including fifteen gold, with all but one of their medals coming in athletics and boxing.
+The country has also produced a number of world class boxers, including Azumah Nelson a three-time world champion and considered as Africa's greatest boxer,[265][266] Nana Yaw Konadu also a three-time world champion,[266] Ike Quartey,[266] and Joshua Clottey.[266]
+Ghana's women's football team won bronze at the Africa Women Cup of Nations 2016 edition in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The team beat South Africa 1–0.[267]
+Ghana will host the 2023 African Games in Accra.
+There are two types of Ghanaian traditional construction: the series of adjacent buildings in an enclosure around a common are common and the traditional round huts with grass roof.[268] The round huts with grass roof architecture are situated in the northern regions of Ghana (Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions), while the series of adjacent buildings are in the southern regions of Ghana (Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Central, Eastern, Greater Accra and Western regions).[268]
+Ghanaian postmodern architecture and high-tech architecture buildings are predominant in the Ghanaian southern regions, while the Ghanaian heritage sites are most evident by the more than thirty forts and castles built in Ghana. Some of these forts are Fort William and Fort Amsterdam. Ghana has museums that are situated inside castles, and two are situated inside a fort.[269] The Military Museum and the National Museum organise temporary exhibitions.[269]
+Ghana has museums that show a in-depth look at specific Ghanaian regions, there are a number of museums that provide insight into the traditions and history of their own geographical area in Ghana.[269] The Cape Coast Castle Museum and St. Georges Castle (Elmina Castle) Museum offer guided tours. The Museum of Science and Technology provides its visitors with a look into the domain of Ghanaian scientific development, through exhibits of objects of scientific and technological interest.[269]
+The coat of arms depicts two animals: the tawny eagle (Aquila rapax, a very large bird that lives in the savannas and deserts;[270] 35% of Ghana's landmass is desert, 35% is forest, 30% is savanna) and the lion (Panthera leo, a big cat); a ceremonial sword, a heraldic castle on a heraldic sea, a cocoa tree and a mine shaft representing the industrial mineral wealth of Ghana, and a five-pointed black star rimmed with gold representing the mineral gold wealth of Ghana and the lodestar of the Ghanaian people.[271] It also has the legend Freedom and Justice.[271]
+The flag of Ghana consists of three horizontal bands (strips) of red (top), gold (middle) and green (bottom); the three bands are the same height and width; the middle band bears a five-pointed black star in the centre of the gold band, the colour red band stands for the blood spilled to achieve the nation's independence: gold stands for Ghana's industrial mineral wealth, and the color green symbolises the rich tropical rainforests and natural resources of Ghana.[43][271]
+In 2011, 1,087,000 tourists visited Ghana.[273] Tourist arrivals to Ghana include South Americans, Asians, Europeans, and North Americans.[274] The attractions and major tourist destinations of Ghana include a warm, tropical climate year-round, diverse wildlife, waterfalls such as Kintampo waterfalls and the largest waterfall in west Africa, Wli waterfalls, Ghana's coastal palm-lined sandy beaches, caves, mountains, rivers, and reservoirs and lakes such as Lake Bosumtwi and the largest man-made lake in the world by surface area, Lake Volta, dozens of forts and castles, World Heritage Sites, nature reserves and national parks.[274]
+The World Economic Forum statistics in 2010 showed that out of the world's favourite tourist destinations, Ghana was ranked 108th out of 139 countries.[275] The country had moved two places up from the 2009 rankings. In 2011, Forbes magazine, published that Ghana was ranked the eleventh most friendly country in the world. The assertion was based on a survey in 2010 of a cross-section of travellers. Of all the African countries that were included in the survey, Ghana ranked highest.[275] Tourism is the fourth highest earner of foreign exchange for the country.[275] In 2017, Ghana ranks as the 43rd–most peaceful country in the world.[276]
+To enter Ghana, it is necessary to have a visa authorised by the Government of Ghana. Travelers must apply for this visa at a Ghanaian embassy; this process can take approximately two weeks. By law, visitors entering Ghana must be able to produce a yellow fever vaccination certificate.[277]
+According to Destination Pride[278] – a data-driven search platform used to visualize the world's LGBTQ+ laws, rights and social sentiment – Ghana's Pride score is 22 (out of 100).[279]
+Lat. and Long. 5°33′N 0°12′W / 5.550°N 0.200°W / 5.550; -0.200 (Accra)Lat. and Long. 6°40′N 1°37′W / 6.667°N 1.617°W / 6.667; -1.617 (Kumasi)

en/2199.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@

+G or g is the seventh letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is gee (pronounced /ˈdʒiː/), plural gees.[1]
+The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of 'C' to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BCE. At this time, 'K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had formerly represented both /ɡ/ and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ in all environments.
+Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that alphabetic order related to the letters' values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.[2] Sampson (1985) suggests that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concrete thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a 'space' was created by the dropping of an old letter."[3] The 3rd-century-BC addition of the letter G to the Roman alphabet is credited to Spurius Carvilius Ruga.[4]
+George Hempl proposed in 1899 that there never was such a "space" in the alphabet and that in fact 'G' was a direct descendant of zeta.  Zeta took shapes like ⊏ in some of the Old Italic scripts; the development of the monumental form 'G' from this shape would be exactly parallel to the development of 'C' from gamma.  He suggests that the pronunciation /k/ > /ɡ/ was due to contamination from the also similar-looking 'K'.[5]
+Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /ɡ/ developed palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ have different sound values depending on context (known as hard and soft C and hard and soft G).  Because of French influence, English language orthography shares this feature.
+The modern lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-storey (sometimes opentail) 'g' and the double-storey (sometimes looptail) 'g'. The single-storey form derives from the majuscule (uppercase) form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from 'c' to the top of the loop, thus closing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The double-storey form (g) had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a closed bowl or loop. The initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper closed bowl. The double-storey version became popular when printing switched to "Roman type" because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put more lines on a page. In the double-storey version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear".
+Generally, the two forms are complementary, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, opentail ⟨ɡ⟩ has always represented a voiced velar plosive, while ⟨⟩ was distinguished from ⟨ɡ⟩ and represented a voiced velar fricative from 1895 to 1900.[6][7] In 1948, the Council of the International Phonetic Association recognized ⟨ɡ⟩ and ⟨⟩ as typographic equivalents,[8] and this decision was reaffirmed in 1993.[9] While the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommended the use of ⟨⟩ for a velar plosive and ⟨ɡ⟩ for an advanced one for languages where it is preferable to distinguish the two, such as Russian,[10] this practice never caught on.[11] The 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the successor to the Principles, abandoned the recommendation and acknowledged both shapes as acceptable variants.[12]
+Wong et al. (2018) found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail 'g' ().[13][14]  They write: "Despite being questioned repeatedly, and despite being informed directly that G has two lowercase print forms, nearly half of the participants failed to reveal any knowledge of the looptail 'g', and only 1 of the 38 participants was able to write looptail 'g' correctly."
+In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs.  Alone, it represents
+In words of Romance origin, ⟨g⟩ is mainly soft before ⟨e⟩ (including the digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩), ⟨i⟩, or ⟨y⟩, and hard otherwise. Soft ⟨g⟩ is also used in many words that came into English through medieval or modern Romance languages from languages without soft ⟨g⟩ (like Ancient Latin and Greek) (e.g.  fragile or logic).
+There are many English words of non-Romance origin where ⟨g⟩ is hard though followed by ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ (e.g. get, gift), and a few in which ⟨g⟩ is soft though followed by ⟨a⟩ such as gaol or margarine.
+The double consonant ⟨gg⟩ has the value /ɡ/ (hard ⟨g⟩) as in nugget, with very few exceptions: /ɡd͡ʒ/ in suggest and /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate and veggies.
+The digraph ⟨dg⟩ has the value /d͡ʒ/ (soft ⟨g⟩), as in badger. Non-digraph ⟨dg⟩ can also occur, in compounds like floodgate and headgear.
+The digraph ⟨ng⟩ may represent
+Non-digraph ⟨ng⟩ also occurs, with possible values
+The digraph ⟨gh⟩ (in many cases a replacement for the obsolete letter yogh, which took various values including /ɡ/, /ɣ/, /x/ and /j/) may represent
+Non-digraph ⟨gh⟩ also occurs, in compounds like foghorn, pigheaded
+The digraph ⟨gn⟩ may represent
+Non-digraph ⟨gn⟩ also occurs, as in signature, agnostic
+The trigraph  ⟨ngh⟩ has the value /ŋ/ as in gingham or dinghy. Non-trigraph ⟨ngh⟩ also occurs, in compounds like stronghold and dunghill.
+G is the tenth least frequently used letter in the English language (after Y, P, B, V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 2.02% in words.
+Most Romance languages and some Nordic languages also have two main pronunciations for ⟨g⟩, hard and soft. While the soft value of ⟨g⟩ varies in different Romance languages (/ʒ/ in French and Portuguese, [(d)ʒ] in Catalan, /d͡ʒ/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in most dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and Italian, soft ⟨g⟩ has the same pronunciation as the ⟨j⟩.
+In Italian and Romanian, ⟨gh⟩ is used to represent /ɡ/ before front vowels where ⟨g⟩ would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, a sound somewhat similar to the ⟨ny⟩ in English canyon. In Italian, the trigraph ⟨gli⟩, when appearing before a vowel or as the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/.
+Other languages typically use ⟨g⟩ to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position.
+Amongst European languages, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, and Slovak are an exception as they do not have /ɡ/ in their native words. In Dutch, ⟨g⟩ represents a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ instead, a sound that does not occur in modern English, but there is a dialectal variation: many Netherlandic dialects use a voiceless fricative ([x] or [χ]) instead, and in southern dialects it may be palatal [ʝ]. Nevertheless, word-finally it is always voiceless in all dialects, including the standard Dutch of Belgium and the Netherlands. On the other hand, some dialects (like Amelands) may have a phonemic /ɡ/.
+Faroese uses ⟨g⟩ to represent /dʒ/, in addition to /ɡ/, and also uses it to indicate a glide.
+In Māori, ⟨g⟩ is used in the digraph ⟨ng⟩ which represents the velar nasal /ŋ/ and is pronounced like the ⟨ng⟩ in singer.
+In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, ⟨g⟩ was used to represent /j/, while /ɡ/ was written as ⟨ǧ⟩ (⟨g⟩ with caron).

en/22.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,143 @@

+Depends on configuration:
+Left-hand manual
+Left-hand manual
+Hand-pumped:
+Bandoneon, concertina, flutina, garmon, trikitixa, Indian harmonium
+Foot-pumped:
+Harmonium, reed organ
+Mouth-blown:
+Claviola, melodica, harmonica, Laotian khene, Chinese shēng, Japanese shō
+Electronic reedless instruments:
+Accordions (from 19th-century German Akkordeon, from Akkord—"musical chord, concord of sounds")[1] are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type, colloquially referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist.  The concertina and bandoneón are related. The harmonium and American reed organ are in the same family, but are typically larger than an accordion and sit on a surface or the floor.
+The accordion is played by compressing or expanding the bellows while pressing buttons or keys, causing pallets to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel, called reeds. These vibrate to produce sound inside the body. Valves on opposing reeds of each note are used to make the instrument's reeds sound louder without air leaking from each reed block.[notes 1] The performer normally plays the melody on buttons or keys on the right-hand manual, and the accompaniment, consisting of bass and pre-set chord buttons, on the left-hand manual.
+The accordion is widely spread across the world because of the waves of immigration from Europe to the Americas and other regions. In some countries (for example Brazil,[2][3] Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Panama) it is used in popular music (for example Gaucho, Forró and Sertanejo in Brazil, Vallenato in Colombia, and norteño in Mexico), whereas in other regions (such as Europe, North America and other countries in South America) it tends to be more used for dance-pop and folk music and is often used in folk music in Europe, North America and South America.
+In Europe and North America, some popular music acts also make use of the instrument. Additionally, the accordion is used in cajun, zydeco, jazz music and in both solo and orchestral performances of classical music. The piano accordion is the official city instrument of San Francisco, California.[4] Many conservatories in Europe have classical accordion departments.  The oldest name for this group of instruments is harmonika, from the Greek harmonikos, meaning "harmonic, musical". Today, native versions of the name accordion are more common. These names refer to the type of accordion patented by Cyrill Demian, which concerned "automatically coupled chords on the bass side".[5]
+Accordions have many configurations and types. What may be easy to do with one type of accordion could be technically challenging or impossible with another, and proficiency with one layout may not translate to another.
+The most obvious difference between accordions is their right-hand manuals. Piano accordions use a piano-style musical keyboard, while button accordions use a buttonboard. Button accordions are furthermore differentiated by their usage of a chromatic or diatonic buttonboard for the right-hand manual.[6]
+Accordions may be either bisonoric, producing different pitches depending on the direction of bellows movement, or unisonoric, producing the same pitch in both directions. Piano accordions are unisonoric. Chromatic button accordions also tend to be unisonoric, while diatonic button accordions tend to be bisonoric,[7] though notable exceptions exist.[8]
+Accordion size is not standardized, and may vary significantly from model to model. Accordions vary not only in their dimensions and weight, but also in number of buttons or keys present in the right- and left-hand manuals. For example, piano accordions may have as few as 12 bass buttons, or up to 120 (and even beyond this in rare cases). Accordions also vary by their available registers and by their specific tuning and voicing.
+Despite these differences, all accordions share a number of common components.
+The bellows is the most recognizable part of the instrument, and the primary means of articulation. The production of sound in an accordion is in direct proportion to the motion of the bellows by the player. In a sense, the role of the bellows can be compared to the role of moving a violin's bow on bowed strings. For a more direct analogy, the bellows can be compared to the role of breathing for a singer. The bellows is located between the right- and left-hand manuals, and is made from pleated layers of cloth and cardboard, with added leather and metal.[9] It is used to create pressure and vacuum, driving air across the internal reeds and producing sound by their vibrations, applied pressure increases the volume.
+The keyboard touch is not expressive and does not affect dynamics: all expression is effected through the bellows. Bellows effects include:
+The accordion's body consists of two wooden boxes joined together by the bellows. These boxes house reed chambers for the right- and left-hand manuals. Each side has grilles in order to facilitate the transmission of air in and out of the instrument, and to allow the sound to project better. The grille for the right-hand manual is usually larger and is often shaped for decorative purposes. The right-hand manual is normally used for playing the melody and the left-hand manual for playing the accompaniment; however, skilled players can reverse these roles and play melodies with the left hand.[notes 2]
+The size and weight of an accordion varies depending on its type, layout and playing range, which can be as small as to have only one or two rows of basses and a single octave on the right-hand manual, to the standard 120-bass accordion and through to large and heavy 160-bass free-bass converter models.
+The accordion is an aerophone. The manual mechanism of the instrument either enables the air flow, or disables it:[notes 3]
+The term accordion covers a wide range of instruments, with varying components. All instruments have reed ranks of some format, apart from reedless digital accordions. Not all have switches to change registers or ranks, as some have only one treble register and one bass register. The most typical accordion is the piano accordion, which is used for many musical genres. Another type of accordion is the button accordion, which is used in musical traditions including Cajun, Conjunto and Tejano music, Swiss and Austro-German Alpine music, and Argentinian tango music. The Helikon-style accordion has multiple flared horns projecting out of the left side to strengthen the bass tone. The word "Helikon" refers to a deep-pitched tuba.
+Different systems exist for the right-hand manual of an accordion, which is normally used for playing the melody (while it can also play chords). Some use a button layout arranged in one way or another, while others use a piano-style keyboard. Each system has different claimed benefits[11] by those who prefer it. They are also used to define one accordion or another as a different "type":
+A button key accordion made by the company Marrazza in Italy. It was brought by Italian immigrants to Australia as a reminder of their homeland.
+A Weltmeister piano accordion by VEB Klingenthaler Harmonikawerke
+Different systems are also in use for the left-hand manual, which is normally used for playing the accompaniment. These almost always use distinct bass buttons and often have buttons with concavities or studs to help the player navigate the layout despite not being able to see the buttons while playing. There are three general categories:
+Inside the accordion are the reeds that generate the instrument tones. These are organized in different sounding banks, which can be further combined into registers producing differing timbres. All but the smaller accordions are equipped with switches that control which combination of reed banks operate, organized from high to low registers. Each register stop produces a separate sound timbre, many of which also differ in octaves or in how different octaves are combined. See the accordion reed ranks and switches article for further explanation and audio samples. All but the smallest accordions usually have treble switches. The larger and more expensive accordions often also have bass switches to give options for the reed bank on the bass side.
+In describing or pricing an accordion, the first factor is size, expressed in number of keys on either side. For a piano type, this could for one example be 37/96, meaning 37 treble keys (three octaves plus one note) on the treble side and 96 bass keys. A second aspect of size is the width of the white keys, which means that even accordions with the same number of keys have keyboards of different lengths, ranging from 14 inches (36 cm) for a child's accordion to 19 inches (48 cm) for an adult-sized instrument. After size, the price and weight of an accordion is largely dependent on the number of reed ranks on either side, either on a cassotto or not, and to a lesser degree on the number of combinations available through register switches.
+Price is also affected by the use of costly woods, luxury decorations, and features such as a palm switch, grille mute, and so on. Some accordion makers sell the same model in a range of different models, from a less-expensive base model to a more costly luxury model. Typically, the register switches are described as Reeds: 5 + 3, meaning five reeds on the treble side and three on the bass, and Registers: 13 + M, 7, meaning 13 register buttons on the treble side plus a special "master" that activates all ranks, like the "tutti" or "full organ" switch on an organ, and seven register switches on the bass side. Another factor affecting the price is the presence of electronics, such as condenser microphones, volume and tone controls, or MIDI sensors and connections.
+The larger piano and chromatic button accordions are usually heavier than other smaller squeezeboxes, and are equipped with two shoulder straps to make it easier to balance the weight and increase bellows control while sitting, and avoid dropping the instrument while standing. Other accordions, such as the diatonic button accordion, have only a single shoulder strap and a right hand thumb strap. All accordions have a (mostly adjustable) leather strap on the left-hand manual to keep the player's hand in position while drawing the bellows. There are also straps above and below the bellows to keep it securely closed when the instrument is not playing.
+In the 2010s, a range of electronic and digital accordions are made. They have an electronic sound module which creates the accordion sound, and most use MIDI systems to encode the keypresses and transmit them to the sound module. A digital accordion can have hundreds of sounds, which can include different types of accordions and even non-accordion sounds, such as pipe organ, piano, or guitar. Sensors are used on the buttons and keys, such as magnetic reed switches. Sensors are also used on the bellows to transmit the pushing and pulling of the bellows to the sound module. Digital accordions may have features not found in acoustic instruments, such as a piano-style sustain pedal, a modulation control for changing keys, and a portamento effect.
+As an electronic instrument, these types of accordions are plugged into a PA system or keyboard amplifier to produce sound. Some digital accordions have a small internal speaker and amplifier, so they can be used without a PA system or keyboard amplifier, at least for practicing and small venues like coffeehouses. One benefit of electronic accordions is that they can be practiced with headphones, making them inaudible to other people nearby. On a digital accordion, the volume of the right-hand keyboard and the left-hand buttons can be independently adjusted.
+Acoustic-digital hybrid accordions also exist. They are acoustic accordions (with reeds, bellows, and so on), but they also contain sensors, electronics, and MIDI connections, which provides a wider range of sound options. An acoustic-digital hybrid may be manufactured in this form, or it may be an acoustic accordion which has had aftermarket electronics sensors and connections added. Several companies sell aftermarket electronics kits, but they are typically installed by professional accordion technicians, due to the complex and delicate nature of the internal parts of an accordion.
+Various hybrid accordions have been created between instruments of different buttonboards and actions.  Many remain curiosities – only a few have remained in use:
+The accordion's basic form is believed to have been invented in Berlin, in 1822, by Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann,[notes 4][13] although one instrument has been recently discovered that appears to have been built earlier.[notes 5][14][15]
+The earliest history of the accordion in Russia is poorly documented. Nevertheless, according to Russian researchers, the earliest known simple accordions were made in Tula, Russia, by Ivan Sizov and Timofey Vorontsov around 1830, after they received an early accordion from Germany.[16] By the late 1840s, the instrument was already very widespread;[17] together the factories of the two masters were producing 10,000 instruments a year. By 1866, over 50,000 instruments were being produced yearly by Tula and neighbouring villages, and by 1874 the yearly production was over 700,000.[18] By the 1860s, Novgorod, Vyatka and Saratov governorates also had significant accordion production. By the 1880s, the list included Oryol, Ryazan, Moscow, Tver, Vologda, Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod and Simbirsk, and many of these places created their own varieties of the instrument.[19]
+The accordion is one of several European inventions of the early 19th century that use free reeds driven by a bellows. An instrument called accordion was first patented in 1829 by Cyrill Demian, of Armenian origin, in Vienna.[notes 6] Demian's instrument bore little resemblance to modern instruments. It only had a left hand buttonboard, with the right hand simply operating the bellows. One key feature for which Demian sought the patent was the sounding of an entire chord by depressing one key. His instrument also could sound two different chords with the same key, one for each bellows direction (a bisonoric action). At that time in Vienna, mouth harmonicas with Kanzellen (chambers) had already been available for many years, along with bigger instruments driven by hand bellows. The diatonic key arrangement was also already in use on mouth-blown instruments. Demian's patent thus covered an accompanying instrument: an accordion played with the left hand, opposite to the way that contemporary chromatic hand harmonicas were played, small and light enough for travelers to take with them and used to accompany singing. The patent also described instruments with both bass and treble sections, although Demian preferred the bass-only instrument owing to its cost and weight advantages.[notes 7]
+The accordion was introduced from Germany into Britain in about the year 1828.[20] The instrument was noted in The Times in 1831 as one new to British audiences[21] and was not favourably reviewed, but nevertheless it soon became popular.[22] It had also become popular with New Yorkers by the mid-1840s.[23]
+After Demian's invention, other accordions appeared, some featuring only the right-handed keyboard for playing melodies. It took English inventor Charles Wheatstone to bring both chords and keyboard together in one squeezebox. His 1844 patent for what he called a concertina also featured the ability to easily tune the reeds from the outside with a simple tool.
+The musician Adolph Müller described a great variety of instruments in his 1833 book Schule für Accordion. At the time, Vienna and London had a close musical relationship, with musicians often performing in both cities in the same year, so it is possible that Wheatstone was aware of this type of instrument and may have used them to put his key-arrangement ideas into practice.
+Jeune's flutina resembles Wheatstone's concertina in internal construction and tone colour, but it appears to complement Demian's accordion functionally. The flutina is a one-sided bisonoric melody-only instrument whose keys are operated with the right hand while the bellows is operated with the left. When the two instruments are combined, the result is quite similar to diatonic button accordions still manufactured today.
+Further innovations followed and continue to the present. Various buttonboard and keyboard systems have been developed, as well as voicings (the combination of multiple tones at different octaves), with mechanisms to switch between different voices during performance, and different methods of internal construction to improve tone, stability and durability. Modern accordions may incorporate electronics such as condenser microphones and tone and volume controls, so that the accordion can be plugged into a PA system or keyboard amplifier for live shows. Some 2010s-era accordions may incorporate MIDI sensors and circuitry, enabling the accordion to be plugged into a synth module and produce accordion sounds or other synthesized instrument sounds, such as piano or organ.
+The accordion has traditionally been used to perform folk or ethnic music, popular music, and transcriptions from the operatic and light-classical music repertoire.[24] Today the instrument is sometimes heard in contemporary pop styles, such as rock and pop-rock,[25] and occasionally even in serious classical music concerts, as well as advertisements.
+The accordion's popularity spread rapidly: it has mostly been associated with the common people, and was propagated by Europeans who emigrated around the world. The accordion in both button and piano forms became a favorite of folk musicians[26] and has been integrated into traditional music styles all over the world: see the list of music styles that incorporate the accordion.
+Early jazz accordionist include Charles Melrose, who recorded Wailing Blues/Barrel House Stomp (1930, Voc. 1503) with the Cellar Boys; Buster Moten, who played second piano and accordion in the Bennie Moten orchestra; and Jack Cornell, who did recordings with Irving Mills. Later jazz accordionists from the United States include Steve Bach, Milton DeLugg, Orlando DiGirolamo, Dominic Frontiere, Guy Klucevsek, Yuri Lemeshev, Frank Marocco, John Serry Sr., Lee Tomboulian, and Art Van Damme. French jazz accordionists include Richard Galliano, Bernard Lubat, and Vincent Peirani. Norwegian jazz accordionists include Asmund Bjørken, Stian Carstensen, Gabriel Fliflet, Frode Haltli, and Eivin One Pedersen.
+While the accordion's left hand preset chord buttons are limited to triads and seventh chords (for the dominant seventh chord and the diminished seventh chord), jazz accordionists expand the range of chord possibilities by using more than one chord button simultaneously, or by using combinations of a chord button and a bass note other than the typical root of the chord. An example of the former technique is used to play a minor seventh chord. To play an "a minor" seventh chord (with an added ninth), the "a minor" and "e minor" preset buttons are pressed simultaneously, along with an "A" bassnote. An example of the latter technique is used to play the half-diminished chord. To play an "e" half-diminished seventh chord, a "g minor" preset button is pressed along with an "E" bassnote.
+The accordion appeared in popular music from the 1900s to the 1960s. This half-century is often called the "golden age of the accordion".[27] Five players, Pietro Frosini, the two brothers Count Guido Deiro and Pietro Deiro and Slovenian brothers Vilko Ovsenik and Slavko Avsenik, Charles Magnante were major influences at this time.[28]
+Most vaudeville theaters closed during the Great Depression, but accordionists during the 1930s–1950s taught and performed for radio. Included among this group was the concert virtuoso John Serry, Sr.[29][30][31] During the 1950s through the 1980s the accordion received significant exposure on television with performances by Myron Floren on The Lawrence Welk Show.[32] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the accordion declined in popularity due to the rise of rock and roll.[33] The first accordionist to appear and perform at the Newport Jazz Festival was Angelo DiPippo. He can be seen playing his accordion in the motion picture The Godfather. He also composed and performed with his accordion on part of the soundtrack of Woody Allen's movie To Rome With Love.  He was featured twice on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
+Richard Galliano is an internationally known accordionist whose repertoire covers jazz, tango nuevo, latin, and classical. Some popular bands use the instrument to create distinctive sounds. A notable example is Grammy Award-winning parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic, who plays the accordion on many of his musical tracks, particularly his polkas. Yankovic was trained in the accordion as a child.[34]
+The accordion has also been used in the rock genre, most notably by John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, featuring more prominently in the band's earlier works.[35] The instrument is still frequently used during live performances, and continues to make appearances in their studio albums. Accordion is also used in the music of the Dropkick Murphys and Gogol Bordello.
+Accordionists in heavy metal music make their most extensive appearances in the folk metal subgenre, and are otherwise generally rare. Full-time accordionists in folk metal seem even rarer, but they are still utilized for studio work, as flexible keyboardists are usually more accessible for live performances. The Finnish symphonic folk-metal band Turisas used to have a full-time accordionist, employing classical and polka sensibilities alongside a violinist. One of their accordionists, Netta Skog, is now a member of Ensiferum, another folk-metal band. Another Finnish metal band, Korpiklaani, invokes a type of Finnish polka called humppa, and also has a full-time accordionist. Sarah Kiener, the former hurdy-gurdy player for the Swiss melodic-death-folk metal band Eluveitie, played a Helvetic accordion known as a zugerörgeli.[citation needed]
+Although best known as a folk instrument, it has grown in popularity among classical composers. The earliest surviving concert piece is Thême varié très brillant pour accordéon methode Reisner, written in 1836 by Louise Reisner of Paris. Other composers, including the Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Italian Umberto Giordano, and the American Charles Ives, wrote works for the diatonic button accordion.
+The first composer to write specifically for the chromatic accordion was Paul Hindemith.[36] In 1922, the Austrian Alban Berg included an accordion in Wozzeck, Op. 7. In 1937 the first accordion concerto was composed in Russia. Other notable composers have written for the accordion during the first half of the 20th century.[37] Included among this group was the Italian-American John Serry Sr., whose Concerto for Free Bass Accordion was completed in 1964.[38][39] In addition, the American accordionist Robert Davine composed his Divertimento for Flute, Clarinet, Bassoon and Accordion as a work for chamber orchestra.[40] American composer William P. Perry featured the accordion in his orchestral suite Six Title Themes in Search of a Movie (2008). The experimental composer Howard Skempton began his musical career as an accordionist, and has written numerous solo works for it. In his work Drang (1999), British composer John Palmer  pushed the expressive possibilities of the accordion/bayan. Luciano Berio wrote Sequenza XIII (1995) for accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti.[41] Accordionists like Mogens Ellegaard, Joseph Macerollo, Friedrich Lips, Hugo Noth, Stefan Hussong, Italo Salizzato, Teodoro Anzellotti, Mie Miki, and Geir Draugsvoll, encouraged composers to write new music for the accordion (solo and chamber music) and also started playing baroque music on the free bass accordion.
+French composer Henri Dutilleux used an accordion in both his late song cycles Correspondances (2003) and Le Temps l'Horloge (2009).  Russian-born composer Sofia Gubaidulina has composed solos, concertos, and chamber works for accordion. Astor Piazzolla's concert tangos are performed widely. Piazzolla performed on the bandoneon, but his works are performed on either bandoneon or accordion.
+The earliest mention of the novel accordion instrument in Australian music occurs in the 1830s.[42]
+The accordion initially competed against cheaper and more convenient reed instruments such as mouth organ, concertina and melodeon.
+Frank Fracchia was an Australian accordion composer[43] and copies of his works "My dear, can you come out tonight"[44] and "Dancing with you"[45] are preserved in Australian libraries.
+Other Australian composers who arranged music for accordion include Reginald Stoneham.[46]
+The popularity of the accordion peaked in the late 1930s[47] and continued until the 1950s.[48]
+The accordion was particularly favoured by buskers.[49][50]
+The accordion is a traditional instrument in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is the dominant instrument used in sevdalinka, a traditional genre of folk music from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is also considered a national instrument of the country.[citation needed]
+The accordion was brought to Brazil by settlers and immigrants from Europe, especially from Italy and Germany, who mainly settled in the south (Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana). The first instrument brought was a "Concertina" (a 120 button chromatic accordion).[51] The instrument was popular in the 1950s, and was common to find several accordions in the same house. There are many different configurations and tunes which were adapted from the cultures that came from Europe.
+Accordion is the official symbol instrument of the Rio Grande do Sul state, where was voted by unanimity in the deputy chamber.[52]
+During the boom of accordions there were around 65 factories in Brazil, where most of them (52) in the south, in Rio Grande do Sul state, with only 7 outside the south. One of the most famous and genuinely Brazilian brands was Acordeões Todeschini from Bento Gonçalves-RS, closed in 1973. The Todeschini accordion is very appreciated today and survives with very few maintainers.[53][54] The most notable musicians of button accordions are Renato Borghetti, Adelar Bertussi, Albino Manique and Edson Dutra.[55]
+Compared to many other countries, the instrument is very popular in mainstream pop music. In some parts of the country, such as the northeast it is the most popular melodic instrument. As opposed to most European folk accordions, a very dry tuning is usually used in Brazil. Outside the south, the accordion (predominantly the piano accordion) is used in almost all styles of Forró (in particular in the subgenres of Xote and Baião) as the principal instrument, Luiz Gonzaga (the "King of the Baião") and Dominguinhos being among the notable musicians in this style from the northeast.  In this musical style the typical combination is a trio of accordion, triangle and zabumba (a type of drum).
+This style has gained popularity recently, in particular among the student population of the southeast of the country (in the Forró Universitário genre, with important exponents today being Falamansa, and trios such as Trio Dona Zefa, Trio Virgulino and Trio Alvorada). Moreover, the accordion is the principal instrument in Junina music (music of the São João Festival), with Mario Zan having been a very important exponent of this music. It is an important instrument in Sertanejo (and Caipira) music, which originated in the midwest and southeast of Brazil, and subsequently has gained popularity throughout the country.
+The accordion is also a traditional instrument in Colombia, commonly associated with the vallenato and cumbia genres. The accordion has been used by tropipop musicians such as Carlos Vives, Andrés Cabas, Fonseca (singer) and Bacilos, as well as rock musicians such as Juanes and pop musicians as Shakira. Vallenato, who emerged in the early twentieth century in a city known as Valledupar, and have come to symbolize the folk music of Colombia.[citation needed]
+Every year in April, Colombia holds one of the most important musical festivals in the country: the Vallenato Legend Festival. The festival holds contests for best accordion player. Once every decade, the "King of Kings" accordion competition takes place, where winners of the previous festivals compete for the highest possible award for a vallenato accordion player: the Pilonera Mayor prize.[56] This is the world's largest competitive accordion festival.
+Norteño heavily relies on the accordion, it is a genre related to polka. Ramón Ayala known in Mexico as the "King of the Accordion" is a norteño musician. Cumbia which features the accordion is also popular with musicians such as Celso Piña creating a more contemporary style. U.S. born Mexican musician Julieta Venegas incorporates the sound of the instrument into rock, pop and folk. She was influenced by her fellow Chicanos Los Lobos who also use the music of the accordion.[57]
+According to Barbara Demick in Nothing to Envy, the accordion is known as "the people's instrument" and all North Korean teachers were expected to learn the accordion.[58]
+The most expensive[according to whom?] accordions are typically fully hand-made, particularly the reeds; completely hand-made reeds have a better tonal quality than even the best automatically-manufactured ones. Some accordions have been modified by individuals striving to bring a more pure[clarification needed] sound out of low-end instruments, such as the ones improved by Yutaka Usui,[59][irrelevant citation] a Japanese craftsman.
+The manufacture of an accordion is only a partly automated process. In a sense[clarification needed], all accordions are handmade, since there is always some hand assembly of the small parts required. The general process involves making the individual parts, assembling the subsections, assembling the entire instrument, and final decorating and packaging.[60]
+Famous[according to whom?][peacock term] centres of production are the Italian cities of Stradella and Castelfidardo, with many small and medium size manufacturers especially at the latter. Castelfidardo honours[clarification needed] the memory of Paolo Soprani who was one of the first large-scale producers. Maugein Freres has built accordions in the French town of Tulle since 1919, and the company is now the last complete-process[clarification needed] manufacturer of accordions in France. German companies such as Hohner and Weltmeister made large numbers of accordions, but production diminished by the end of the 20th century.  Hohner still manufactures its top-end models[clarification needed] in Germany, and Weltmeister instruments are still handmade by HARMONA Akkordeon GmbH in Klingenthal.

en/220.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@

+Hans Christian Andersen (/ˈændərsən/, Danish: [ˈhænˀs ˈkʰʁestjæn ˈɑnɐsn̩] (listen); 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875), in Denmark usually called H.C. Andersen, was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his fairy tales.
+Andersen's fairy tales, consisting of 156 stories across nine volumes[1] and translated into more than 125 languages,[2] have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well.[3] His most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Little Mermaid," "The Nightingale," "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Red Shoes", "The Princess and the Pea," "The Snow Queen," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Little Match Girl," and "Thumbelina." His stories have inspired ballets, plays, and animated and live-action films.[4] One of Copenhagen's widest and busiest boulevards, skirting Copenhagen City Hall Square at the corner of which Andersen's larger-than-life bronze statue sits, is named "H.C. Andersens Boulevard."[5]
+"The Ugly Duckling"
+Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark on 2 April 1805. He was an only child. His father, also named Hans, considered himself related to nobility (his paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had belonged to a higher social class,[6] but investigations have disproved these stories).[6][7] A persistent speculation suggests that Andersen was an illegitimate son of King Christian VIII, but this notion has been challenged.[6]
+Hans Christian Andersen was baptised April 15, 1805 in Saint Hans Church (St John's Church) in Odense, Denmark. His certificate of birth was not drafted until november 1823, according to which six Godparents were present at the baptising ceremony: Madam Sille Marie Breineberg, Maiden Friederiche Pommer, Shuemaker Peder Waltersdorff, journeyman carpenter Anders Jørgensen, Hospital portner Nicolas Gomard, and Royal Hatter Jens Henrichsen Dorch.
+Andersen's father, who had received an elementary school education, introduced his son to literature, reading to him the Arabian Nights.[8] Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an illiterate washerwoman. Following her husband's death in 1816, she remarried in 1818.[8] Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children where he received a basic education and had to support himself, working as an apprentice to a weaver and, later, to a tailor. At fourteen, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing.
+Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, held great affection for Andersen and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King Frederick VI to pay part of the youth's education.[9] Andersen had by then published his first story, "The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave" (1822). Though not a stellar pupil, he also attended school at Elsinore until 1827.[10]
+He later said, that his years at this school were the darkest and most bitter years of his life. At one particular school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home. There, he was abused and he was told, that it was done in order "to improve his character". He later said that the faculty had discouraged him from writing, which then resulted in a depression.[11]
+A very early fairy tale by Andersen,  "[The Tallow Candle]" (Danish: Tællelyset), was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story, written in the 1820s, was about a candle that did not feel appreciated. It was written while Andersen was still in school and dedicated to one of his benefactors. The story remained in that family's possession until it turned up among other family papers in a local archive.[12]
+In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with the short story "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager". Its protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat. Andersen followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower, and a short volume of poems. He made little progress in writing and publishing immediately following the issue of these poems but he did receive a small travel grant from the king in 1833. This enabled him to set out on the first of many journeys throughout Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, Andersen wrote the story "Agnete and the Merman". The same year he spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante, the place which inspired the title of "The Bay of Fables".[13] He arrived in Rome in October 1834. Andersen's travels in Italy were reflected in his first novel, a fictionalized autobiography titled The Improvisatore (Improvisatoren), published in 1835 to instant acclaim.[14][15]
+Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection. (Danish: Eventyr, fortalt for Børn. Første Samling.) is a collection of nine fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. The tales were published in a series of three installments by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen, Denmark between May 1835 and April 1837, and represent Andersen's first venture into the fairy tale genre.
+The first installment of sixty-one unbound pages was published 8 May 1835 and contained "The Tinderbox", "Little Claus and Big Claus", "The Princess and the Pea" and "Little Ida's Flowers". The first three tales were based on folktales Andersen had heard in his childhood while the last tale was completely Andersen's creation and created for Ida Thiele, the daughter of Andersen's early benefactor, the folklorist Just Mathias Thiele. Reitzel paid Andersen thirty rixdollars for the manuscript, and the booklet was priced at twenty-four shillings.[16][17]
+The second booklet was published on 16 December 1835 and contained "Thumbelina", "The Naughty Boy" and "The Traveling Companion". "Thumbelina" was completely Andersen's creation although inspired by "Tom Thumb" and other stories of miniature people. "The Naughty Boy" was based on a poem by Anacreon about Cupid, and "The Traveling Companion" was a ghost story Andersen had experimented with in the year 1830.[16]
+The third booklet contained "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes", and it was published on the 7 April 1837. "The Little Mermaid" was completely Andersen's creation though influenced by De la Motte Fouqué's "Undine" (1811) and the lore about mermaids. This tale established Andersen's international reputation.[18] The only other tale in the third booklet was "The Emperor's New Clothes", which was based on a medieval Spanish story with Arab and Jewish sources. On the eve of the third installment's publication, Andersen revised the finish of his story, (the Emperor simply walks in procession) to its now-familiar finale of a child calling out, "The Emperor is not wearing any clothes!"[19]
+Danish reviews of the first two booklets appeared in 1836 and they were not enthusiastic. The critics disliked the chatty, informal style, and immorality that flew in the face of their expectations. Children's literature was meant to educate rather than to amuse. The critics discouraged Andersen from pursuing this type of style. Andersen believed, that he was working against the critics' preconceived notions about fairy tales and he temporarily returned to novel-writing. The critic's reaction was so severe that Andersen waited a full year before publishing his third installment.[20]
+The nine tales of the three booklets were combined and then published in one volume and sold at seventy-two shillings. A title page, a table of contents, and a preface by Andersen were published in this volume.[21]
+In 1851, he published In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches. The publication received wide acclaims. A keen traveler, Andersen published several other long travelogues: Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz, Swiss Saxony, etc. etc. in the Summer of 1831, A Poet's Bazaar, In Spain and A Visit to Portugal in 1866. (The last describes his visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and Jose O'Neill, who were his friends in the mid-1820s while he was living in Copenhagen.) In his travelogues, Andersen took heed of some of the contemporary conventions related to travel writing but he always developed the style to suit his own purpose. Each of his travelogues combines documentary and descriptive accounts of his experiences, adding additional philosophical passages on topics such as what it is to be an author, general immortality, and the nature of fiction in literary travel reports. Some of the travelogues, such as In Sweden, even contain fairy-tales.
+In the 1840s, Andersen's attention again returned to the theatre stage, but with little success. He had better luck with the publication of the Picture-Book without Pictures (1840). A second series of fairy tales was started in 1838 and a third serie in 1845. Andersen was now celebrated throughout Europe although his native Denmark still showed some resistance to his pretensions.
+Between 1845 and 1864, H. C. Andersen lived at Nyhavn 67, Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque is placed on a building.[22]
+In ‘Andersen as a Novelist’, Kierkegaard remarks that Andersen is characterized as, “...a possibility of a personality, wrapped up in such a web of arbitrary moods and moving through an elegiac duo-decimal scale [i.e., a chromatic scale. Proceeding by semitones, and therefore including sharps as well as flats, such a scale is associated more with lament or elegy than is an ordinary diatonic scale] of almost echoless, dying tones just as easily roused as subdued, who, in order to become a personality, needs a strong life-development.”
+In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England and he enjoyed a triumphal social success during this summer. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where intellectual people would meet, and it was at one of such parties where he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda, which Andersen wrote about in his diary: "We were on the veranda, and I was so happy to see and speak to England's now-living writer whom I do love the most."[23]
+The two authors respected each other's work and as writers, they shared something important in common: depictions of the poor and the underclass who often had difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by abject poverty. In the Victorian era there was a growing sympathy for children and an idealization of the innocence of childhood.
+Ten years later, Andersen visited England again, primarily to meet Dickens. He extended the planned brief visit to Dickens' home at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, much to the distress of Dickens' family. After Andersen was told to leave, Dickens gradually stopped all correspondence between them, this to the great disappointment and confusion of Andersen, who had quite enjoyed the visit and could never understand why his letters went unanswered.[23]
+In Andersen's early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.[24][25]
+Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women, and many of his stories are interpreted as references.[26]  At one point, he wrote in his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!"[27] A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Voigt was found on Andersen's chest when he died several decades after he first fell in love with her, and after, he presumably fell in love with others. Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin. One of his stories, "The Nightingale", was written as an expression of his passion for Jenny Lind and became the inspiration for her nickname, the "Swedish Nightingale".[28] Andersen was often shy around women and had extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to go to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not the same; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844: "farewell ... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny".[29]
+Andersen certainly experienced same-sex attraction as well: he wrote to Edvard Collin:[30] "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench ... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery."[31] Collin, who preferred women, wrote in his own memoir: "I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering." Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish dancer Harald Scharff[32] and Carl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,[33] did not result in any relationships.
+According to Anne Klara Bom and Anya Aarenstrup from the H. C. Andersen Centre of University of Southern Denmark, "To conclude, it is correct to point to the very ambivalent (and also very traumatic) elements in Andersen's emotional life concerning the sexual sphere, but it is decidedly just as wrong to describe him as homosexual and maintain that he had physical relationships with men. He did not. Indeed, that would have been entirely contrary to his moral and religious ideas, aspects that are quite outside the field of vision of Wullschlager and her like."[34]
+In early 1872, Andersen fell out of his bed and was severely hurt; he never fully recovered from the resultant injuries. Soon afterward, he started to show signs of liver cancer.[35]
+He died on 4 August 1875, in a house called Rolighed (literally: calmness), near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends, the banker Moritz Melchior and his wife.[35] Shortly before his death, Andersen had consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."[35]
+His body was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen, in the family plot of the Collins. However, in 1914 the stone was moved to another cemetery (today known as "Frederiksbergs ældre kirkegaard"), where younger Collin family members were buried. For a period, his, Edvard Collin's and Henriette Collin's graves were unmarked. A second stone has been erected, marking H.C. Andersen's grave, now without any mention of the Collin couple, but all three still share the same plot.[36]
+At the time of his death, Andersen was internationally revered, and the Danish Government paid him an annual stipend as a "national treasure".[37]
+Noteworthy recordings in English include:
+Tale Spinners for Children released seven LP's of dramatizations of Andersen stories:
+Andersen's stories laid the groundwork for other children's classics, such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by A. A. Milne. The technique of making inanimate objects, such as toys, come to life ("Little Ida's Flowers") would later also be used by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter.[44][45]
+Statue in Central Park, New York commemorating Andersen and The Ugly Duckling
+Andersen statue at the Rosenborg Castle Gardens, Copenhagen
+Statue in Odense being led out to the harbour during a public exhibition
+Odense statue half-submerged in the water
+Statue in Solvang, California, a city built by Danish immigrants.
+Statue in Bratislava, Slovakia
+Portrait bust in Sydney unveiled by the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark in 2005
+In Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy Opera Iolanthe, the Lord Chancellor mocks the Fairy Queen with a reference to Andersen, thereby implying that her claims are fictional:[84]
+It seems that she's a fairy
+From Andersen's library,
+And I took her for
+The proprietor
+Of a Ladies' Seminary!
+In Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, the middle-aged Frederik contemplates reading erotic literature to his young, virginal bride in order to seduce her, but concludes: "Her taste is much blander / I'm sorry to say / But is Hans Christian Ander- / Sen ever risqué?"
+Titles like "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" have become idiomatic in several languages.
+Andersen's fairy tales include:

en/2200.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,177 @@

+Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (US: /ˈdʒɑːkəmoʊ ˌliːəˈpɑːrdi, - ˌleɪə-/,[3][4] Italian: [ˈdʒaːkomo leoˈpardi]; 29 June 1798 – 14 June 1837) was an Italian philosopher, poet, essayist, and philologist. He is considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world, as well as one of the principals of literary romanticism; his constant reflection on existence and on the human condition—of sensuous and materialist inspiration—has also earned him a reputation as a deep philosopher. He is widely seen as one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century[5][6] but routinely compared by Italian critics to his older contemporary Alessandro Manzoni despite expressing "diametrically opposite positions."[7] Although he lived in a secluded town in the conservative Papal States, he came into contact with the main ideas of the Enlightenment, and through his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era. The strongly lyrical quality of his poetry made him a central figure on the European and international literary and cultural landscape.[8]
+Leopardi was born into a local noble family in Recanati, in the Marche, at the time ruled by the papacy. His father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, who was fond of literature but weak and reactionary, remained bound to antiquated ideas and prejudices. His mother, Marchioness Adelaide Antici Mattei, was a cold and authoritarian woman, obsessed with rebuilding the family's financial fortunes, which had been destroyed by her husband's gambling addiction. A rigorous discipline of religion and economy reigned in the home. However, Giacomo's happy childhood, which he spent with his younger brother Carlo Orazio and his sister Paolina, left its mark on the poet, who recorded his experiences in the poem Le Ricordanze.
+Following a family tradition, Leopardi began his studies under the tutelage of two priests, but his thirst for knowledge was quenched primarily in his father's rich library. Initially guided by Father Sebastiano Sanchini, Leopardi undertook vast and profound reading. These "mad and most desperate" studies included an extraordinary knowledge of classical and philological culture – he could fluently read and write Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew – but he lacked an open and stimulating formal education.
+Between the ages of twelve and nineteen, he studied constantly, driven also by a need to escape spiritually from the rigid environment of the paternal palazzo. His continual studies undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, probably Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, denied him youth's simplest pleasures.[9]
+In 1817 the classicist Pietro Giordani arrived at the Leopardi estate. To Giacomo he became a lifelong friend and derived from this a sense of hope for the future. Meanwhile, his life at Recanati weighed on him increasingly, to the point where he attempted to escape in 1818, but he was caught by his father and brought home. Thereafter relations between father and son continued to deteriorate, and Giacomo was constantly monitored by the rest of the family.
+When in 1822 he was briefly able to stay in Rome with his uncle, he was deeply disappointed by the mood of corruption and decadence and by the hypocrisy of the Church. He was impressed by the tomb of Torquato Tasso, to whom he felt bound by a common sense of unhappiness. While Foscolo lived tumultuously between adventures, amorous relations, and books, Leopardi was barely able to escape from his domestic oppression. To Leopardi, Rome seemed squalid and modest when compared to the idealized image that he had created of it.[10] He had already suffered disillusionment in love at home, with his cousin Geltrude Cassi. Meanwhile, his physical ailments continued to worsen.
+In 1824, a bookstore owner, Stella, called him to Milan, asking him to write several works, including Crestomazia della prosa e della poesia italiane. He moved during this period between Milan, Bologna, Florence and Pisa.[citation needed] In 1827 in Florence, Leopardi met Alessandro Manzoni, although they did not see things eye to eye. He paid a visit to Giordani and met the historian Pietro Colletta.
+In 1828, physically infirm and worn out by work, Leopardi had refused the offer of a professorship in Bonn or Berlin, made by the Ambassador of Prussia in Rome. In the same year, he had to abandon his work with Stella and return to Recanati. In 1830, Colletta offered him a chance to return to Florence, thanks to a financial contribution from the "Friends of Tuscany". The subsequent printing of the Canti allowed him to live away from Recanati until 1832. Leopardi found kindred company among the liberals and republicans seeking to liberate Italy from its feudal yoke to Austria. Although his idiosyncratic and pessimistic ideas made him a party of one, he railed against Italy's "state of subjection" and was "in sympathy with the ideals of constitutionalism, republicanism and democracy, and supportive of movements urging Italians to fight for their independence."[11]
+Later he moved to Naples near his friend Antonio Ranieri, hoping to benefit physically from the climate. He died during the cholera epidemic of 1837, the immediate cause probably being pulmonary edema or heart failure, due to his fragile physical condition. Thanks to Antonio Ranieri's intervention with the authorities, Leopardi's remains were not buried in a common grave (as the strict hygiene regulations of the time required), but in the atrium of the Church of San Vitale at Fuorigrotta. In 1898 his tomb was moved to the Parco Virgiliano and declared a national monument.[12][13]
+There have been speculation in academic circles that Leopardi may have had homoromantic tendencies.[14] His intimate friendships with other men, particularly Ranieri, involved expressions of love and desire beyond what was typical even of Romantic poets. He also wrote in his poetry of directing amorous attention on the younger brother of a woman he admired. In 1830, Leopardi received a letter from Pietro Colletta, nowadays interpreted as a declaration of masonic brotherhood.[15][16] Leopardi's close friend Antonio Ranieri was a Master Mason.[17] In the course of his life, Leopardi had more than twenty-five sentimental female friendships, such as the ones with Teresa Carniani Malvezzi or Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte.[18]
+The Leopardi's family share the origin of Tomasi's family, at the time of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great.[19][20][21]
+These were rough years for Leopardi, as he started developing his concept of Nature. At first he saw this as "benevolent" to mankind, helping to distract people from their sufferings. Later, by 1819, his idea of Nature became dominated by a destructive mechanism.
+Up to 1815, Leopardi was essentially an erudite philologist. Only thereafter he began to dedicate himself to literature and the search for beauty, as he affirms in a famous letter to Giordani of 1817. Pompeo in Egitto ("Pompey in Egypt", 1812), written at the age of fourteen, is an anti-Caesar manifesto. Pompey is seen as the defender of republican liberties. Storia dell'Astronomia ("History of Astronomy", 1813) is a compilation of all of the knowledge accumulated in this field up to the time of Leopardi. From the same year is Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi ("Essay on the popular errors of the ancients"), which brings the ancient myths back to life. The "errors" are the fantastic and vague imaginings of the ancients. Antiquity, in Leopardi's vision, is the infancy of the human species, which sees the personifications of its myths and dreams in the stars.
+The year 1815 saw the production of Orazione agli Italiani in Occasione della Liberazione del Piceno ("Oration to the Italians on the liberation of Piceno"), a paean to the 'liberation' achieved by Italy after the intervention of the Austrians against Murat. In the same year he translated Batracomiomachia (the war between the frogs and mice in which Zeus eventually sends in the crabs to exterminate them all), an ironic rhapsody which pokes fun at Homer's Iliad, once attributed to the epic poet himself.
+In 1816 Leopardi published Discorso sopra la vita e le opere di Frontone ("Discourse on the life and works of Fronto"). In the same year, however, he entered a period of crisis. He wrote L'appressamento della morte, a poem in terza rima in which the poet experiences death, which he believes to be imminent, as a comfort. Meanwhile, there began other physical sufferings and a serious degeneration of his eyesight. He was acutely aware of the contrast between the interior life of man and his incapacity to manifest it in his relations with others.
+Leopardi abandoned his philological studies and moved increasingly toward poetry by reading Italian authors of the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries, as well as some of his Italian and French contemporaries. His vision of the world underwent a change: he ceased to seek comfort in religion, which had permeated his childhood, and became increasingly inclined toward an empirical and mechanistic vision of the universe inspired by John Locke among others.
+In 1816 the idylls Le rimembranze and Inno a Nettuno ("Hymn to Neptune") were published. The second, written in ancient Greek, was taken by many critics as an authentic Greek classic. He also translated the second book of the Aeneid and the first book of the Odyssey. In the same year, in a letter to the compilers of the Biblioteca Italiana (Monti, Acerbi, Giordani), Leopardi argued against Madame de Staël's article inviting Italians to stop looking to the past, but instead study the works of foreigners, so as to reinvigorate their literature. Leopardi maintained that "knowing", which is acceptable, is not the same thing as "imitating", which is what Madame de Stael demanded, and that Italian literature should not allow itself to be contaminated by modern forms of literature, but look to the Greek and Latin classics. A poet must be original, not suffocated by study and imitation: only the first poet in the history of humanity could have been truly original, since he had had no one to influence him. It was therefore necessary to get as close to the originals as possible, by drawing inspiration from one's own feelings, without imitating anyone.
+Thanks to his friendship with Giordani, with whom, in 1817, he had begun a prolific correspondence, his distancing from the conservatism of his father became even sharper. It was in the following year that he wrote All'Italia ("To Italy") and Sopra il monumento di Dante ("On the Monument of Dante"), two very polemical and classical patriotic hymns in which Leopardi expressed his adherence to liberal and strongly secular ideas.
+In the same period, he participated in the debate, which engulfed the literary Europe of the time, between the classicists and the romanticists, affirming his position in favour of the first in the Discorso di un Italiano attorno alla poesia romantica ("Discourse of an Italian concerning romantic poetry").
+In 1817 he fell in love with Gertrude Cassi Lazzari and wrote Memorie del primo amore ("Memories of first love"). In 1818 he published Il primo amore and began writing a diary which he would continue for fifteen years (1817–1832), the Zibaldone.
+All'Italia and Sopra il monumento di Dante marked the beginning of the series of major works. In the two canti, the concept of "excessive" or "over-civilization" which is deleterious for life and beauty first makes it appearance. In the poem All'Italia, Leopardi laments the fallen at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC, fought between the Greeks under Leonidas and the Persians under Xerxes), and evokes the greatness of the past. In the second canto, he turns to Dante and asks from him pity for the pathetic state of his fatherland. In the great canti which follow (forty-one, including fragments), there is a gradual abandonment of the reminiscences, of literary allusions and of conventionalisms.
+In 1819, the poet attempted to escape from his oppressive domestic situation, travelling to Rome. But he was caught by his father. In this period, his personal pessimism evolves into the peculiar philosophical pessimism of Leopardi. Le Rimembranze and L'appressamento della morte also belong to this early period of the art of Leopardi.
+The six Idilli ("Idylls"), namely Il sogno ("The dream"), L'Infinito ("The Infinite"), La sera del dì di festa ("The evening of the feast day"), Alla Luna ("To the Moon"), La vita solitaria ("The solitary life") and Lo spavento notturno ("Night-time terror"), followed hard upon the first canti. Il sogno is still Petrarchesque, while the others which followed are the fruit of a more mature and independent art. Leopardi establishes with nature a sort of accord which attenuates the pain and discomfort.
+In all of the idylls, the initial sparks, offered by memory or by the sweetness of nature, transmute their colors into the intuition of universal pain, of the transience of things, of the oppressive weight of eternity, of the inexorable passing of time, of the blind power of nature.
+[original research?] The highest expression of poetry is reached in Leopardi in L'Infinito, which is at once philosophy and art, since in the brief harmony of the verses are concentrated the conclusions of long philosophical meditations. The theme is a concept, which mind can only with extreme difficulty conceive. The poet narrates an experience he often has when he sits in a secluded place on a hill. His eyes cannot reach the horizon, because of a hedge surrounding the site; his thought, instead, is able to imagine spaces without limits:
+"Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
+E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
+Dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude."
+Another interpretation suggests that this hill represents the heights human thought achieves, but at the top there is a hedge that prevents one from seeing the ultimate horizon, beyond death and existence. Thus this hedge can be interpreted as signifying the limits of human understanding regarding human existence in the Universe. This is why the poem begins with "Sempre caro mi fu" which can be translated as "It was always precious for me". The silence is deep; when a breath of wind comes, this voice sounds like the voice of present time, and by contrast it evokes all times past, and eternity. Thus, the poet's thought is overwhelmed by new and unknown suggestions, but "il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare" ("shipwreck / seems sweet to me in this sea." English translation by A. S. Kline).
+Leopardi returns to the evocation of ancient eras and exhorts his contemporaries to seek in the writings of the classics the noble ancient virtues.
+In occasion of the discovery of the De Republica of Cicero on the part of Mai, Leopardi wrote the poem Ad Angelo Mai ("To Angelo Mai") in which he invokes the figures of many Italian poets, from Dante and Petrarch to Torquato Tasso whom he felt so near to himself, to his contemporary Vittorio Alfieri.
+In the lyrical Nelle nozze ("On the marriage of my sister Paolina"), an event that failed to happen, in the course of wishing happiness for his sister, the poet uses the opportunity to exalt the strength and the virtue of the women of antiquity and to denigrate his own time because it did not allow one to be virtuous and happy, since only after death are those who have lived a morally good life praised.
+The canto Ad un vincitor di pallone ("To the winner of a game of football") expresses disdain for the tedium of a life that is nothing but a monotonous repetition of human affairs and to which only danger can restore value: only he who has been near the gates of death is able to find sweetness in life.
+In Bruto minore ("Brutus the Younger"), Brutus the assassin of Caesar is depicted as a man who has always believed in honor, virtue and liberty and who has ultimately sacrificed everything for these ideals. He has come to the realization, too late to change things, that everything was done in vain, that everything has been pointless, that he will even die dishonoured and disgraced for his well-intentioned actions.
+His meditations bring him to the conclusion that morality is meaningless; Jove rewards only the selfish and plays arbitrary games with hapless mankind. Man is more unhappy than the rest of the animal kingdom because the latter do not know that they are unhappy and therefore do not meditate on the question of suicide and, even if they could, nothing would prevent them from carrying out the act without hesitation.
+Sappho is also a tragic figure. In fact, she is a great and generous spirit, an exceptional mind and a sublime character trapped in a miserable body. Sappho loved the light (the loved one, according to the legend, was named Phaon, in Greek Φάων, from φῶς, light) but her life was made of shadow; she loved nature and beauty, but nature has been like an evil stepmother to her and she, who is sensitive, cultured and refined, is closed in the prison of a deformed body. Nor can the greatness of her genius help to release her from this horror.
+In Sappho, Leopardi sees himself retarded, but in reality the poet of Lesbos was neither deformed nor unhappy as she is depicted by Leopardi, who based his depiction on a false traditional belief. Sappho knew, tasted, and sang of beauty and love more than was possible for Leopardi. But the resignation to unhappiness, to pain and to solitude, and the renunciation of the joys of life, sounds in the verses of Leopardi like the sincere sigh of a feminine soul.
+The canto begins as a sweet apostrophe to the placid nights, once dear to the serene poet, but the words turn rapidly to a violent evocation of nature in tempest which echoes her inner turmoil. The anguishing and accusative questions which Leopardi poses to a destiny which has denied beauty to the miserable Sappho are cut short by the thought of death. After having wished to the man she has loved in vain that little bit of happiness which is possible to attain on this earth, Sappho concludes by affirming that of all the hopes for joy, of all the illusions, there remains to await her only Tartarus.
+The canti Alla primavera ("To Spring") and Al conte Carlo Pepoli ("To Count Carlo Pepoli") emerge from the same spiritual situation. The first laments the fall of the great illusions ("gli ameni inganni") and the imaginary mythological worlds of the past, which embellished and enriched the fantasy of man. The second decries the loss of happiness that has resulted.
+In Alla primavera, Leopardi praises the ancient times when the nymphs populated the fields, the woods, the springs, the flowers and the trees. Although the lyrical style is apparently classical, it is also pervaded by the characteristic dissatisfaction with the present of the romantics. Leopardi, here, romanticizes the pure intentions of the Greeks, since he was actually romantic in his sentiments and classical in his imagination and intellect.
+In the Epistolario a Carlo Pepoli, Leopardi attempts to prove to his friend the thesis (reminiscent of Buddhism) according to which, since life has no other aim but happiness and since happiness is unattainable, all of life is nothing but an interminable struggle. But he who refuses to work is oppressed by the tedium of life and must seek distraction in useless pastimes. Moreover, those who dedicate themselves to poetry, if they have no fatherland, are tormented more than those who do by a lack of freedom because they fully appreciate the value of the idea of nationhood.
+At this point, a disillusioned Leopardi considers abandoning poetry for philosophy, but without any hope of glory. He has resigned himself to the certainty of pain and of boredom to which mankind is condemned and he therefore believes it necessary to abandon the illusions and poetry in order to speculate on the laws and destiny of the universe.
+In 1823, he wrote the canto Alla sua donna ("To his woman"), in which he expresses his ardent aspiration for a feminine ideal which, with love, might render life beautiful and desirable. During his youth, he had dreamt in vain of encountering a woman who embodied such a feminine ideal: a platonic idea, perfect, untouchable, pure, incorporeal, evanescent, and illusory.
+It is a hymn not to one of Leopardi's many "loves," but to the discovery that he had unexpectedly made—at that summit of his life from which he would later decline—that what he had been seeking in the lady he loved was "something" beyond her, that was made visible in her, that communicated itself through her, but was beyond her. This beautiful hymn to Woman ends with this passionate invocation:
+Between the years 1823 and 1828, Leopardi set aside lyric poetry in order to compose his prose magnum opus, Operette morali ("Small Moral Works"), which consists (in its final form) of a series of 24 innovative dialogues and fictional essays treating a variety of themes that had already become familiar to his work by then. One of the most famous dialogue is: Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese, in which the author expresses his main philosophical ideas.
+After 1823, Leopardi abandoned the myths and illustrious figures of the past, which he now considered to be transformed into meaningless symbols and turned to writing about suffering in a more "cosmic" sense.
+In 1828, Leopardi returned to lyric poetry with Il Risorgimento ("Resurgence"). The poem is essentially a history of the spiritual development of the poet from the day in which he came to believe that every pulse of life had died out in his soul to the moment in which the lyrical and the sentimental were reawakened in him. A strange torpor had rendered him apathetic, indifferent to suffering, to love, to desire, and to hope. Life had seemed desolate to him until the ice began to melt and the soul, reawakening, finally felt the revivification of the ancient illusions. Having reconquered the gift of sentiment, the poet accepts life as it is because it is revived by the feeling of suffering which torments his heart and, so long as he lives, he will not rebel against those who condemn him to live. This recovered serenity consists in the contemplation of one's own conscience of one's own sentiments, even when desolation and despair envelop the soul.
+Leopardi rejoices to have rediscovered in himself the capacity to be moved and to experience pain, after a long period of impassibility and boredom. With Risorgimento, lyricism is reawakened in the poet, who composes canti, generally brief, in which a small spark or a scene is expanded, extending itself into an eternal vision of existence. He reevokes images, memories and moments of past happiness.
+In 1828, Leopardi composed perhaps his most famous poem, A Silvia ("To Silvia"). The young lady of the title—possibly the daughter of a servant in the Leopardi household—is the image of the hopes and illusions of the young poet, destined to succumb far too early in the struggle against reality, just as the youth of Silvia is destroyed by tuberculosis, the "chiuso morbo".[24] It is often asked whether Leopardi was actually in love with this young woman, but to seek confirmation in biographical evidence is to miss the point of the poem. A Silvia is the expression of a profound and tragic love of life itself, which Leopardi, despite all the suffering, the psychological torments and the negative philosophizing, could not suppress in his spirit. This poem demonstrates why Leopardi's so-called "nihilism" does not run deep enough to touch the well-spring of his poetry: his love of man, of nature, and of beauty. However, the accusation Leopardi makes against Nature is very strong, as being responsible for the sweet dreams of youth and for the subsequent suffering, after "the appearance of truth" (l'apparir del vero, v.60) has shattered them.
+The canto Il passero solitario ("The Lonely Sparrow") is of a classical perfection for the structure of the verses and for the sharpness of the images. Leopardi contemplates the bounty of nature and the world which smiles at him invitingly, but the poet has become misanthropic and disconsolate with the declining of his health and youth and the deprivation of all joy. He senses the feast which nature puts forth to him, but is unable to take part in it and foresees the remorse which will assail him in the years to come when he will regret the youthful life that he never lived. In this sense, he is alone just like, or worse than, the sparrow, since the latter lives alone by instinct, while the poet is endowed with reason and free will.
+In 1829, at Recanati, where he was constrained to return, against his wishes, because of increasing infirmity and financial difficulties, the poet wrote Le Ricordanze ("Memories"), perhaps the poem where autobiographical elements are the most evident. It narrates the story of the painful joy of the man who feels his sentiments to be stirred by seeing again places full of childhood and adolescence memories. These sentiments now confront a horrible and merciless reality and deep regret for lost youth. The ephemeral happiness is embodied in Nerina (a character perhaps based on the same inspiration as Silvia, Teresa Fattorini).
+Nerina and Silvia are both dreams, evanescent phantasms; life for Leopardi is an illusion, the only reality being death. The woman, Silvia, Nerina, or "la sua donna" are always only the reflection of the poet himself, since life itself is, for him, an elusive and deceptive phantasm.
+In 1829, Leopardi wrote La quiete dopo la tempesta ("The Calm After the Storm"), in which the light and reassuring verses at the beginning evolve into the dark desperation of the concluding strophe, where pleasure and joy are conceived of as only momentary cessations of suffering and the highest pleasure is provided only by death. It also delegates with his dignities onto the crowd nor grieving himself on the sorrows he obsessed and afterwards, his prowess dominates.
+The same year's Il sabato del villaggio ("Saturday in the village"), like La quiete dopo la tempesta, opens with the depiction of the calm and reassuring scene of the people of the village (Recanati) preparing for Sunday's rest and feast. Later, just as in the other poem, it expands into deep, though brief and restrained, poetic-philosophical considerations on the emptiness of life: the joy and illusion of expectation must come to an unsatisfactory end in the Sunday feast; likewise, all the sweet dreams and expectations of youth will turn into bitter disillusion.
+Around the end of 1829 or the first months of 1830, Leopardi composed the Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia ("Night-time chant of a wandering Asian sheep-herder"). In writing this piece, Leopardi drew inspiration from the reading of Voyage d'Orenbourg à Boukhara fait en 1820, by the Russian baron Meyendorff, in which the baron tells of how certain sheep-herders of central Asia belonging to the Kirghiz population practiced a sort of ritual chant consisting of long and sweet strophes directed at the full moon. The canto, which is divided into five strophes of equal length, takes the form of a dialogue between a sheep-herder and the moon. The canto begins with the words "Che fai tu Luna in ciel? Dimmi, che fai, / silenziosa Luna?" ("What do you do Moon in the sky? Tell me, what do you do, / silent Moon?"). Throughout the entire poem, in fact, the moon remains silent, and the dialogue is transformed therefore into a long and urgent existential monologue of the sheep-herder, in desperate search of explanations to provide a sense to the pointlessness of existence. The two characters are immersed in an indeterminate space and time, accentuating the universal and symbolic nature of their encounter: the sheep-herder represents the human species as a whole and his doubts are not contingent—that is, anchored to a here and now—but are rather characteristic of man at all times; the moon, on the other hand, represents Nature, the "beautiful and terrible"[25] force that fascinates and, at the same time, terrifies the poet.
+The sheep-herder, a man of humble condition, directs his words to the moon in a polite but insistent tone, seething with melancholy. It is precisely the absence of response on the part of the celestial orb which provokes him to continue to investigate, ever more profoundly, into the role of the moon, and therefore into that of humanity, with respect to life and the world, defining ever more sharply the "arid truth" so dear to the poetry of Leopardi. In the first strophe, in fact, the sheep-herder, even while defining the moon as silent, actually expects a response from it and discovers many analogies between his own condition and that of the moon: both of them arise in the morning, follow their always self-identical paths and finally stop to rest. The life of the moon, as much as that of the sheep-herder, seems completely senseless. There appears, however, in the middle of this strophe, a very important distinction: the course of human life is finite and its passage, similar to that of a "vecchierel bianco" (Petrarch, Canzoniere, XVI), terminates tragically in the "horrid abyss" of death. Such a condition, which is defined in the second strophe as a condition of profound suffering ("se la vita è sventura, perché da noi si dura?") is extremely different from that of the Moon, which seems instead to be eternal, "virgin", and "intact".
+In the third strophe, the sheep-herder turns again to the moon with renewed vigor and hope, believing that the orb, precisely because of this privileged extra-worldly condition, can provide him the answers to his most urgent questions: what is life? What could possibly be its purpose since it is necessarily finite? What is the first cause of all being? But the moon, as the sheep-herder learns quickly, cannot provide the answers to these questions even if it knew them, since such is nature: distant, incomprehensible, mute if not indifferent to the concerns of man. The sheep-herder's search for sense and happiness continues all the way to the final two strophes. In the fourth, the sheep-herder turns to his flock, observing how the lack of self-awareness that each sheep has allows it to live out, in apparent tranquillity, its brief existence, without suffering or boredom. But this idea is ultimately rejected by the sheep-herder himself in the final strophe, in which he admits that, probably, in whatever form life is born and manifests itself, whether moon, sheep or man, whatever it is capable of doing, life is equally bleak and tragic.
+In this period, Leopardi's relations with his family are reduced to a minimum and he is constrained to maintain himself on his own financially. In 1830, after sixteen months of "notte orribile" (awful night), he accepted a generous offer from his Tuscan friends, which enabled him to leave Recanati.
+In the last canti, philosophical investigation predominates, with the exception of Tramonto della Luna ("Decline of the Moon") which is a decisive return to idyllic lyricism.
+In 1831, Leopardi wrote Il pensiero dominante ("The Dominating Thought"), which exalts love as a living or vitalizing force in itself, even when it is unrequited. The poem, however, features only the desire for love without the joy and the vitalizing spirit and, therefore, remaining thought, illusion. Leopardi destroys everything, condemns everything, but wishes to save love from the universal miasma and protect it at least within the profundity of his own soul. The more desolate the solitude which surrounds him, the more tightly he grasps onto love as the faith in his idealized, illusory, eternal woman ("sua donna") who placates suffering, disillusion and bitterness. The poet of universal suffering sings of a good which surpasses the ills of life and, for an instant, seems to become the singer of a possible happiness. But the idea of death as the only hope for man returns, since the world offers only two beautiful things: love and death.
+Il pensiero dominante represents the first ecstatic moment of love, which almost nullifies the awareness of human unhappiness. It is worth the price of tolerating the suffering of a long life in order to experience the joy of such beauty. Il pensiero dominante and Il risorgimento are the only poems of joy written by Leopardi, though even in those two poems there always reappears, inextinguishable, the pessimism which sees in the object of joy a vain image created by the imagination.
+The concept of the love-death duality is taken up again in the 1832 canto Amore e Morte ("Love and Death"). It is a meditation on the torment and annihilation which accompanies love. Love and death, in fact, are twins: the one is the generator of all things beautiful and the other puts an end to all ills. Love makes strong and cancels the fear of death and when it dominates the soul, it makes it desire death. Some, who are won over by passion, will die for it happily. Others kill themselves because of the wounds of love. But happiness consists in dying in the drunkenness of passion. Of the two twins, Leopardi dares to invoke only death, which is no longer symbolized by the horrid Ade of Saffo, but by a young virgin who grants peace for eternity. Death is the sister of love and is the great consoler who, along with her brother, is the best that the world can offer.
+Also in 1832, inspired by a 17th-century poem by Girolamo Graziani titled La conquista di Granada ("The Capture of Granada"), Leopardi wrote Consalvo. Consalvo obtains a kiss from the woman he has long loved unrequitedly only when, gravely injured, he is at the point of death. Consalvo is different from the other canti in that it has the form of a novella in verse or of a dramatic scene. It is the fruit of the sentimental and languid literature which characterized much of the romanticism outside of Italy.
+Written in 1834, Aspasia emerges, like Consalvo, from the painful experience of desperate and unrequited love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. Aspasia-Fanny is the only real woman represented in the poetry of Leopardi. Aspasia is the able manipulator whose perfect body hides a corrupt and prosaic soul. She is the demonstration that beauty is dishonest.
+The poet, vainly searching for love, takes his revenge on destiny and the women who have rejected him, above all Targioni, whose memory continues to disturb the poet after more than a year away from her. The memory of the woman loved in vain constantly returns, but the canto, inspired by disdain for the provocative and, simultaneously, distancing behavior of the woman also expresses resignation to one's fate and the pride of having been able to recover one's own independence. Aspasia, in her limitedness as a woman cannot grasp the profundity of masculine thought.
+"A se stesso" (To himself) is an 1833 canto in which Leopardi talks to his heart. The last deceit, love, is dead too. He thought that love was one of the few things that makes life worth living but he changed his mind after his beloved Fanny's refusal. She, moreover, was in love with Antonio Ranieri, Leopardi's best friend, who remained with the poet until the end. His desire, his hope, his "sweet deceits" are ended. His heart has beaten all his life but it's time for it to stop beating and staying still. There is no place for hope anymore. All he wants is dying, because death is the only good gift nature has given to human beings. In "Love and Death", love was still considered a good thing because when you are in love you have stronger feelings, you feel alive in an always new way. Now he has become skeptical also about love, because if he can't have Fanny, nothing remains for him in life. He just wants to die, to make all the suffering end. Death is a gift as it is the end of all human pain, which is inevitable because it's in the essence of men, it's in the cruel project of nature. The last verse is "e l'infinita vanità del tutto" which means "and the infinite vanity of the whole" and it indicates the inanity of human life and human world.
+In the canto Sopra un bassorilievo antico sepolcrale ("Over an Ancient Sepulchre Bas-relief"), a young woman has died and is represented in the act of saying goodbye to her loved ones. The poet weighs the pros and cons of death, remaining in doubt about whether the young woman's destiny is good or bad.
+Leopardi, even while being highly conscious of the indifference of nature, never ceased entirely to love it. In these verses, the poet poses challenging and pointed questions to nature, enumerating the ills and sufferings which, because of death, are inflicted on humanity. Under the influence of love, the poet had apparently found happiness at least in death (Il pensiero dominante, Amore e morte). Now, instead, even this last illusion has fallen and he sees nothing but unhappiness everywhere.
+Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna scolpito nel monumento sepolcrale della medesima ("On the portrait of a beautiful woman sculpted in her sepulchral monument") is basically an extension of the above.
+The poet, drawing his inspiration from a funerary sculpture, evokes the image of a beautiful woman and compares her breathtaking beauty to the heart-rendingly sad image that she has become; one that is no more than mud, dust and skeleton. As well as being centred on the transience of beauty and of human things, the poem points to the specular antinomy between human ideals and natural truth. Leopardi does not deny—if anything, he emphasizes—the beauty of the human species in general, and by the end of the poem extends his point to all possible forms of beauty, intellectual as well as aesthetic. However, this universal beauty remains unattainable to a human nature that is nothing but "polvere e ombra" ("dust and shadow"), and that may touch—but never possess—the ideals that it perceives, remaining rooted to the natural world in which it was born, as well as to its demands.
+In 1836, while staying near Torre del Greco in a villa on the hillside of Vesuvius, Leopardi wrote his moral testament as a poet, La Ginestra ("The Broom"), also known as Il Fiore del Deserto ("The flower of the desert"). The poem consists of 317 verses and uses free strophes of hendecasyllables and septuplets as its meter. It is the longest of all the Canti and has an unusual beginning. In fact, among all the Leopardian canti only this one begins with a scene of desolation, to be followed by an alternation between the enchantment of the panorama and of the starry night sky. On the literary level, it is the maximum realization of that anti-idyllic "new poetic" with which Leopardi had already experimented from the 1830s.
+Leopardi, after having described the nothingness of the world and of man with respect to the universe; after having lamented the precariousness of the human condition threatened by the capriciousness of nature, not as exceptional evils but as continuous and constant; and after having satirized the arrogance and the credulity of man, who propounds ideas of progress and hopes, even while knowing he is mortal, to render himself eternal, concludes with the observation that reciprocal solidarity is the only defence against the common enemy which is nature (see Operette morali, "Dialogo di Plotino e Porfirio").
+In this canto, in which Leopardi expresses his vast thought about mankind, history, and nature, autobiographical elements can be found: both direct (the places described are those who surround the poet in his late years) and indirect, in the image of a man who is poor, weak, but courageous enough to be aware of his real condition. The humble plant of ginestra, living in desolate places without surrendering to the force of Nature, resembles this ideal man, who rejects any illusions about himself and does not invoke from Heaven (or Nature) an impossible help.
+Vesuvius, the great mountain which brings destruction, dominates the entire poem. The only attainable truth is death, toward which man must inexorably advance, abandoning every illusion and becoming conscious of his own miserable condition. Such awareness will placate the mutual hatreds.
+It is a vast poem, symphonically constructed with brilliant alternations of tone, from the grandiose and tragic painting of the volcano threatening destruction and of extensions of infertile lava, to the sharp ideological argumentation, to the cosmic sparks which project the nothingness of the earth and of man in the immensity of the universe, to the vision of the infinite passage of centuries of human history on which the immutable threat of nature has always weighed, to the gentle notes dedicated to the "flower in the desert", in which are compressed complex symbolic meanings: pity toward the sufferings of man and the dignity which should be characteristic of man when confronted with the invincible force of a nature which crushes him.
+An essential change occurs with the Ginestra, which closes the poetic career of Leopardi along with Il tramonto della Luna, which takes up the old themes of the fall of youthful illusions. The poem reiterates and reaffirms the sharp anti-optimistic and anti-religious polemic, but in a new and democratic register. Here, Leopardi no longer denies the possibility of civic progress: he seeks to construct an idea of progress founded precisely on his pessimism.
+Il tramonto della Luna ("The Waning of the Moon"), the last canto, was composed by Leopardi in Naples shortly before his death. The moon wanes, leaving nature in total darkness, just as youth passes away leaving life dark and derelict. The poet seems to presage the imminence of his own death.
+In 1845, Ranieri published the definitive edition of the Canti according to the will of the author.
+In the Palinodia al marchese Gino Capponi ("Palinody to Marquis Gino Capponi"), Leopardi fakes a retraction ("Palinodia") of his pessimism. The work, written in 1835, was intended to be satirical (he first believes that man is unhappy and miserable, but now progress has made him reconsider his position), but the thought of the inevitable destruction to which nature condemns everything leads him to express bitter conclusions in spite of himself. Regarding this work, the Marquis Capponi wrote in a letter to Leopardi that he shared, at least in part, many of his ideas and thanked him for the "noble verses". However, in a letter addressed to Viesseux, he expressed himself in rather different terms: "Now it behoves that I write [back] to that damned hunchback who has put it into his head to mock me."
+The satiric tone adopted by Leopardi through much of the Operette morali is also evinced in some of his late poetic texts, such as the Palinodia and I nuovi credenti. But the clearest demonstration of his mastery of this art form is probably the Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia, a brief comic-heroic poem of eight stanzas of eight lines each. Leopardi wrote it between 1831 and 1835, beginning it during his last stay in Florence and finishing it in Naples. The publication took place, posthumously, in Paris in 1842, provoking a universal reaction of outrage and condemnation, as much for the cutting and anti-heroic representation of the events of the Risorgimento as for the numerous materialistic philosophical digressions.
+The term Paralipòmeni is Greek for "things left undone or unsaid". Batracomiomachìa means "war between the frogs and the mice". Batracomiomachia was also the title of a pseudo-Homeric poem which was actually written in the 4th or 5th century BC and translated by Leopardi between 1815 and 1826. The title therefore alludes to an integration of the original work, which is taken up again where it left off and the narrative progresses. The subject is a fable regarding the conflict between the mice that inhabit the nation of Topaia and the invading crabs. But behind the plot, there is hidden a robust sarcastic and polemical motivation. The animals and their doings have an allegorical value. In the crabs, portrayed unsympathetically and with monstrous characteristics, are to be recognized the Austrians; in the mice, sometimes generous but mostly ingenuous and cowardly, the liberal Italians. The poem represents the historical events that took place between 1815 and 1821: the climate of the Restoration desired by the Holy Alliance and the fruitless attempts at insurrection of 1820–21. Even the revolutionary movements of 1831 are included by Leopardi, who was able to follow them by way of the moderate Tuscan circles which he frequented and who perhaps provided him with the inspiration for the work.
+The adoption of the poetic genre required the abandonment of the lyric style and the adoption of a narrative pace marked by a constant critical-satirical tension toward the ideological and philosophical beliefs of contemporary culture: Christian spiritualism, faith in progress, and anthropocentrism. Even the slogans of the political struggle of the liberals are derided, both in their expression of expectation of foreign intervention and in their faith in the model of a constitutional monarchy. In this fashion, the Paralipomeni represent another part of Leopardi's polemical war with the present, and above all an exceptional sally into the territory of historical/political commentary, generally not confronted by Leopardi in a direct form. Of the Italian Risorgimento, he delineates the fundamental limits here with an extraordinary tempestivity: the tendency to compromise with ancient interests and constituted powers, the vanity, the opportunism, the ideological ingenuousness, the lack of an opportune pragmatic awareness. The style generally renounces the expressive concentration of the lyric texts and extends itself in a wide and relaxed discursive pace, with alterations between adventurous moments and ferociously caricatural and polemical points, of description and philosophical digressions.
+In March 1837, shortly before his death, Leopardi announced that he would gather into one volume some "thoughts" ("pensieri") on man and society. Such a collection was supposed to be part of a French edition of the complete works of Leopardi. A few months later (on 14 June) the poet died, leaving the work incomplete and the fragments were published by his friend Ranieri, who also provided the title. [26]
+The bulk of the contents of Pensieri are derived from the Zibaldone. The tone is sharply argumentative with respect to humanity, which Leopardi judges to be malevolent and it almost seems as if the poet wants to take his final revenge on the world. [27]
+The Zibaldone di pensieri (see also Commonplace book#Zibaldone) is a collection of personal impressions, aphorisms, profound philosophical observations, philological analyses, literary criticism and various types of notes which was published posthumously in seven volumes in 1898 with the original title of Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura (Miscellaneous Thoughts on Philosophy and Literature).
+The publication took place thanks to a special governmental commission presided over by Giosuè Carducci in occasion of the centennial anniversary of the poet's birth. It was only in 1937, after the republication of the original text enriched with notes and indices by the literary critic Francesco Flora, that the work definitively took on the name by which it is known today.
+In the Zibaldone, Leopardi compares the innocent and happy state of nature with the condition of modern man, corrupted by an excessively developed faculty of reason which, rejecting the necessary illusions of myth and religion in favor of a dark reality of annihilation and emptiness, can only generate unhappiness. The Zibaldone contains the poetic and existential itinerary of Leopardi himself; it is a miscellanea of philosophical annotations, schemes, entire compositions, moral reflections, judgements, small idylls, erudite discussions and impressions. Leopardi, even while remaining outside of the circles of philosophical debate of his century, was able to elaborate an extremely innovative and provocative vision of the world. It is not much of a stretch to define Leopardi as the father of what would eventually come to be called nihilism.
+Schopenhauer, in mentioning the great minds of all ages who opposed optimism and expressed their knowledge of the world's misery, wrote:
+But no one has treated this subject so thoroughly and exhaustively as Leopardi in our own day. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence. He presents it on every page of his works, yet in such a multiplicity of forms and applications, with such a wealth of imagery, that he never wearies us, but, on the contrary, has a diverting and stimulating effect.

en/2201.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,206 @@

+Gibraltar (/dʒɪˈbrɔːltər/ jih-BRAWL-tər, Spanish: [xiβɾalˈtaɾ]) is a British Overseas Territory located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula.[5][6] It has an area of 6.7 km2 (2.6 sq mi) and is bordered to the north by Spain. The landscape is dominated by the Rock of Gibraltar at the foot of which is a densely populated town area, home to over 32,000 people, primarily Gibraltarians.[7]
+In 1704, Anglo-Dutch forces captured Gibraltar from Spain during the War of the Spanish Succession on behalf of the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. The territory was ceded to Great Britain in perpetuity under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. During the Napoleonic Wars and World War II it was an important base for the Royal Navy as it controlled the entrance and exit to the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, which is only 14.3 km (8.9 mi) wide at this naval choke point. It remains strategically important, with half the world's seaborne trade passing through the strait.[8][9][10] Today Gibraltar's economy is based largely on tourism, online gambling, financial services and bunkering.[11][12][13][14]
+The sovereignty of Gibraltar is a point of contention in Anglo-Spanish relations because Spain asserts a claim to the territory.[15][12] Gibraltarians rejected proposals for Spanish sovereignty in a 1967 referendum and, in a 2002 referendum, the idea of shared sovereignty was also rejected.
+The name is derived from Arabic: جبل طارق‎, romanized: Jabal Ṭāriq, lit. 'Mount of Tariq' (named after the 8th century Moorish military leader Tariq ibn Ziyad).[16] That continues to be its name in Arabic.  It has also been suggested that the name is a contraction of Arabic: جبل على الطريق‎, romanized: jabal ealaa altariq, lit. 'mount on the way [from Africa to Iberia]'
+Evidence of Neanderthal habitation in Gibraltar from around 50,000 years ago has been discovered at Gorham's Cave.[17] The caves of Gibraltar continued to be used by Homo sapiens after the final extinction of the Neanderthals. Stone tools, ancient hearths and animal bones dating from around 40,000 years ago to about 5,000 years ago have been found in deposits left in Gorham's Cave.[18]
+Numerous potsherds dating from the Neolithic period have been found in Gibraltar's caves, mostly of types typical of the Almerian culture found elsewhere in Andalusia, especially around the town of Almería, from which it takes its name.[19] There is little evidence of habitation in the Bronze Age, when people had largely stopped living in caves.[20]
+During ancient times, Gibraltar was regarded by the peoples of the Mediterranean as a place of religious and symbolic importance. The Phoenicians were present for several centuries since around 950 BC, apparently using Gorham's Cave as a shrine to the genius loci,[21] as did the Carthaginians and Romans after them. Gibraltar was known as Mons Calpe, a name perhaps of Phoenician origin.[22] Mons Calpe was considered by the ancient Greeks and Romans as one of the Pillars of Hercules, after the Greek legend of the creation of the Strait of Gibraltar by Heracles. There is no known archaeological evidence of permanent settlements from the ancient period.[23] They settled at the head of the bay in what is today known as the Campo (hinterland) of Gibraltar.[24] The town of Carteia, near the location of the modern Spanish town of San Roque, was founded by the Phoenicians around 950 BC on the site of an early settlement of the native Turdetani people.[25]
+After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Gibraltar came briefly under the control of the Vandals, who crossed into Africa at the invitation of Boniface, the Count (or commander) of the territory.
+The area later formed part of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania for almost 300 years, from 414 until 711 AD.
+Following a raid in 710, a predominantly Berber army under the command of Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa in April 711 and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Gibraltar (though most likely not in the bay or at the Rock itself).[26][27] Tariq's expedition led to the Islamic conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula. Mons Calpe was renamed Jabal Ṭāriq  (جبل طارق), "the Mount of Tariq", subsequently corrupted into Gibraltar.[22]
+In 1160 the Almohad Sultan Abd al-Mu'min ordered that a permanent settlement, including a castle, be built. It received the name of Medinat al-Fath (City of the Victory).[28] The Tower of Homage of the Moorish Castle remains standing today.
+From 1274 onwards, the town was fought over and captured by the Nasrids of Granada (in 1237 and 1374), the Marinids of Morocco (in 1274 and 1333) and the kings of Castile (in 1309).
+In 1462 Gibraltar was captured by Juan Alonso de Guzmán, 1st Duke of Medina Sidonia, from the Emirate of Granada.[29]
+After the conquest, Henry IV of Castile assumed the additional title of King of Gibraltar, establishing it as part of the comarca of the Campo Llano de Gibraltar.[30] Six years later, Gibraltar was restored to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who sold it in 1474 to a group of 4350 conversos (Christian converts from Judaism) from Cordova and Seville and in exchange for maintaining the garrison of the town for two years, after which time they were expelled, returning to their home towns or moving on to other parts of Spain.[31] In 1501 Gibraltar passed back to the Spanish Crown, and Isabella I of Castile issued a Royal Warrant granting Gibraltar the coat of arms that it still uses.
+In 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet, representing the Grand Alliance, captured the town of Gibraltar on behalf of the Archduke Charles of Austria in his campaign to become King of Spain.  Subsequently, most of the population left the town with many settling nearby.[32]  As the Alliance's campaign faltered, the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht was negotiated, which ceded control of Gibraltar to Britain to secure Britain's withdrawal from the war. Unsuccessful attempts by Spanish monarchs to regain Gibraltar were made with the siege of 1727 and again with the Great Siege of Gibraltar (1779 to 1783), during the American War of Independence.
+After the destructive Great Siege, the town was almost entirely rebuilt.[33] Giovanni Maria Boschetti, who arrived in Gibraltar in 1784 as a 25-year-old from Milan, where he is thought to have been a stonemason or engineer, built the Victualling Yard (completed in 1812) and many other buildings. Boschetti is regarded as having been responsible for setting the old town's style, described by Claire Montado, chief executive of the Gibraltar Heritage Trust, as "military-ordnance-style arched doorways, Italianate stucco relief, Genoese shutters, English Regency ironwork balconies, Spanish stained glass and Georgian sash and casement windows."[33]
+During the Napoleonic Wars Gibraltar became a key base for the Royal Navy and played an important role leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805). Its strategic location made it a key base during the Crimean War of 1854–1856. In the 18th century, the peacetime military garrison fluctuated in numbers from a minimum of 1,100 to a maximum of 5,000. The first half of the 19th century saw a significant increase of population to more than 17,000 in 1860, as people from Britain and all around the Mediterranean – Italian, Portuguese, Maltese, Jewish and French – took up residence in the town.[34]
+Its strategic value increased with the opening of the Suez Canal, as it lay on the sea route between the UK and the British Empire east of Suez. In the later 19th century, major investments were made to improve the fortifications and the port.[35]
+During the Second World War, most of Gibraltar's civilian population was evacuated, mainly to London, but also to parts of Morocco and Madeira and to Gibraltar Camp in Jamaica. The Rock was strengthened as a fortress. On 18 July 1940, the Vichy French air force attacked Gibraltar in retaliation for the British bombing of the Vichy navy. The naval base and the ships based there played a key role in the provisioning and supply of the island of Malta during its long siege. As well as frequent short runs, known as "Club Runs", towards Malta to fly off aircraft reinforcements (initially Hurricanes, but later, notably from the USN aircraft carrier Wasp, Spitfires), the critical Operation Pedestal convoy was run from Gibraltar in August 1942. This resupplied the island at a critical time in the face of concentrated air attacks from German and Italian forces. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's reluctance to allow the German Army onto Spanish soil frustrated a German plan to capture the Rock, codenamed Operation Felix.
+In the 1950s, Franco renewed Spain's claim to sovereignty over Gibraltar and restricted movement between Gibraltar and Spain. Gibraltarians voted overwhelmingly to remain under British sovereignty in the 1967 Gibraltar sovereignty referendum, which led to the passing of the Gibraltar Constitution Order in 1969. In response, Spain completely closed the border with Gibraltar and severed all communication links.[36] The border with Spain was partially reopened in 1982 and fully reopened in 1985 before Spain's accession to the European Community.
+In the early 2000s, Britain and Spain were in negotiations over a potential agreement that would see them sharing sovereignty over Gibraltar. The government of Gibraltar organized a referendum on the plan, and 99% of the population voted to reject it.[37][38] The British government committed to respecting the Gibraltarians' wishes.[39] A new Constitution Order was approved in referendum in 2006. A process of tripartite negotiations started in 2006 between Spain, Gibraltar and the UK, ending some restrictions and dealing with disputes in some specific areas such as air movements, customs procedures, telecommunications, pensions and cultural exchange.[40]
+In the British referendum on membership of the European Union 96% of Gibraltarians voted to remain on an 84% turnout.[41] Spain renewed calls for joint Spanish–British control of the peninsula;[42] these were strongly rebuffed by Gibraltar's Chief Minister.[43] On 18 October 2018, however, Spain seemed to have reached an agreement with the United Kingdom in relation to its objections to Gibraltar leaving the EU with the UK, with Spain's prime minister Pedro Sánchez stating, "Gibraltar will no longer be a problem in arriving at a Brexit deal."[44]
+Under its current constitution, Gibraltar has almost complete internal self-governance through a parliament[45][46][47] elected for a term of up to four years. The unicameral parliament presently consists of 17 elected members, and the Speaker who is not elected, but appointed by a resolution of the parliament.[48] The government consists of 10 elected members. The head of state is the British monarch Queen Elizabeth II, who is represented by the Governor of Gibraltar. The governor enacts day-to-day matters on the advice of the Gibraltar Parliament, but is responsible to the British government in respect of defence, foreign policy, internal security and general good governance.
+Judicial and other appointments are made on behalf of the monarch in consultation with the head of the elected government.[49][50][51]
+The 2011 election was contested by the Gibraltar Social Democrats (GSD), Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party (GSLP)-Gibraltar Liberal Party (GLP) Alliance and the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP was a new party, formed in 2006 and fielded candidates in the 2007 election, but none were elected. The head of government is the Chief Minister (as of December 2011[update], Fabian Picardo). All local political parties oppose any transfer of sovereignty to Spain, instead supporting self-determination. The main UK opposition parties also support this policy, and it is British government policy not to engage in talks about the sovereignty of Gibraltar without the consent of the people of Gibraltar.[52]
+Gibraltar was part of the European Union, having joined through the European Communities Act 1972 (UK), which gave effect to the Treaty of Accession 1972, as a dependent territory of the United Kingdom under what was then article 227(4) of the Treaty Establishing the European Community covering special member state territories, with exemption from some areas such as the European Union Customs Union, Common Agricultural Policy and the Schengen Area. It is the only British Overseas Territory which was part of the European Union. After a 10-year campaign for the right to vote in European elections, since 2004 the people of Gibraltar have participated in elections for the European Parliament as part of the South West England constituency.[53] On 23 June 2016 Gibraltar voted along with the United Kingdom in the EU referendum; 96% of its population voted to remain, but the overall United Kingdom result gave a 51.9% majority to leaving the EU.[54] Nevertheless, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stated on 18 October 2018 that the Gibraltar protocol had been "resolved" and that Spain will hold no objection when Gibraltar leaves the EU with Britain.[55][56]
+Gibraltar was nominated to be included on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories by the United Kingdom when the list was created in 1946[57] and has been listed ever since.[58] The government of Gibraltar has actively worked to have Gibraltar removed from the list,[59] and in 2008 the British government declared Gibraltar's continued presence on the list an anachronism.[60]
+Gibraltar is not a member of the Commonwealth of Nations in its own right and is represented by the United Kingdom but was granted Associate Membership of the Commonwealth Foundation in 2004. Gibraltar has competed in the Commonwealth Games since 1958.
+Gibraltar's territory covers 6.7 square kilometres (2.6 sq mi) and shares a 1.2-kilometre (0.75 mi) land border with Spain. The town of La Línea de la Concepción, a municipality of the province of Cádiz, lies on the Spanish side of the border. The Spanish hinterland forms the comarca of Campo de Gibraltar (literally "Countryside of Gibraltar"). The shoreline measures 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) in length. There are two coasts ("Sides") of Gibraltar: the East Side, which contains the settlements of Sandy Bay and Catalan Bay; and the Westside, where the vast majority of the population lives. Gibraltar has no administrative divisions but is divided into seven Major Residential Areas.
+Having negligible natural resources and few natural freshwater resources, limited to natural wells in the north, until recently Gibraltar used large concrete or natural rock water catchments to collect rainwater. Fresh water from the boreholes is nowadays supplemented by two desalination plants: a reverse osmosis plant, constructed in a tunnel within the rock, and a multi-stage flash distillation plant at North Mole.[61]
+Gibraltar's terrain consists of the 426-metre-high (1,398 ft) Rock of Gibraltar[62] made of Jurassic limestone, and the narrow coastal lowland surrounding it. It contains many tunnelled roads, most of which are still operated by the military and closed to the general public.
+Gibraltar has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification Csa),[63][64] with mild, rainy winters and warm, dry summers. As is the case for nearby Algeciras and Tarifa, summers are significantly cooler and annual temperature more constant than other cities on the southern coast of the Iberian peninsula because of its position on the Strait of Gibraltar. Rain occurs mainly in winter, with summer being generally dry. Its average annual temperature is about 22 °C (72 °F) as a daily high and 15 °C (59 °F) as the overnight low. In the coldest month, January, the high temperature averages 16.3 °C (61.3 °F) and the overnight low is 11 °C (52 °F) and the average sea temperature is 16 °C (61 °F). In the warmest month, August, the daily high temperature is 25 °C (77 °F), the overnight low is 20 °C (68 °F), and the average sea temperature is 22 °C (72 °F).[65]
+[66]
+[67][note 1]
+Over 500 different species of flowering plants grow on the Rock. Gibraltar is the only place in Europe where the Gibraltar candytuft (Iberis gibraltarica) is found growing in the wild; the plant is otherwise native to North Africa. It is the symbol of the Upper Rock nature reserve. Olive and pine trees are among the most common of those growing around the Rock.
+Most of the Rock's upper area is covered by a nature reserve which is home to around 230 Barbary macaques, the famous "apes" of Gibraltar, which are actually monkeys. These are the only wild apes or monkeys found in Europe.[68] This species, known scientifically as Macaca sylvanus, is listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List and is declining. Three-quarters of the world population live in the Middle Atlas mountains of Morocco. Recent genetic studies and historical documents point to their presence on the Rock before its capture by the British, having possibly been introduced during the Islamic period. A superstition analogous to that of the ravens at the Tower of London states that if the apes ever leave, so will the British. In 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so concerned about the dwindling population of apes that he sent a message to the Colonial Secretary requesting that something be done about the situation.[69]
+Other mammals found in Gibraltar include rabbits, foxes and bats. Dolphins and whales are frequently seen in the Bay of Gibraltar. Migrating birds are very common and Gibraltar is home to the only Barbary partridges found on the European continent.
+In 1991, Graham Watson, Gibraltar's MEP, highlighted conservationists' fears that urban development, tourism and invasive plant species were threatening Gibraltar's own plants as well as birds and bat species.[70]
+In May 2016 a report by the World Health Organization showed that Gibraltar had the worst air quality in any British territory. The report concentrated on PM10 and PM2.5 pollutants in the air.[71]
+The British military traditionally dominated Gibraltar's economy, with the naval dockyard providing the bulk of economic activity. This, however, has diminished over the last 20 years, and is estimated to account for only 7 percent of the local economy, compared to over 60 percent in 1984. Today, Gibraltar's economy is dominated by four main sectors: financial services, online gambling, shipping, and tourism, which includes duty-free retail sales to visitors.[72] The territory also has a small manufacturing sector, with one company supplying ambulances produced from converted SUV vehicles to the United Nations and other agencies.[73][74]
+Gibraltar's labour market shows an extremely low unemployment rate of around 1 percent. Nearly half (46%) of the total employment is covered by frontier workers (employees who are normally resident in Spain but are employed in Gibraltar), the large majority of them (59%) of Spanish nationality.[75]
+In the early 2000s, many bookmakers and online gaming operators moved to Gibraltar to benefit from operating in a regulated jurisdiction with a favourable corporate tax regime. This corporate tax regime for non-resident controlled companies was phased out by January 2011 and replaced by a still favourable fixed corporate tax rate of 10 percent.[76]
+Tourism is also a significant industry. Gibraltar is a popular port for cruise ships and attracts day visitors from resorts in Spain. The Rock is a popular tourist attraction, particularly among British tourists and residents in the southern coast of Spain. It is also a popular shopping destination, and all goods and services are VAT free, but may be subject to Gibraltar taxes. Many of the large British high street chains have branches or franchises in Gibraltar including Morrisons, Marks & Spencer and Mothercare. Branches and franchises of international retailers such as Tommy Hilfiger and Sunglass Hut are also present in Gibraltar, as is the Spanish clothing company Mango.
+A number of British and international banks have operations based in Gibraltar. Jyske Bank claims to be the oldest bank in the country, based on Jyske's acquisition in 1987 of Banco Galliano, which began operations in Gibraltar in 1855. An ancestor of Barclays, the Anglo-Egyptian Bank, entered in 1888, and Credit Foncier (now Crédit Agricole) entered in 1920.
+In 1967, Gibraltar enacted the Companies (Taxation and Concessions) Ordinance (now an Act), which provided for special tax treatment for international business.[77] This was one of the factors leading to the growth of professional services such as private banking and captive insurance management. Gibraltar has several attractive attributes as a financial centre, including a common law legal system and access to the EU single market in financial services. The Financial Services Commission (FSC),[78] which was established by an ordinance in 1989 (now an Act) that took effect in 1991, regulates the finance sector.[79] In 1997, the Department of Trade and Industry established its Gibraltar Finance Centre (GFC) Division to facilitate the development the financial sector development. As of 2012[update], Gibraltar has 0.103 Big Four accounting firm offices per 1,000 population, the second highest in the world after the British Virgin Islands, and 0.6 banks per 1,000 people, the fifth most banks per capita in the world.[80] As of 2017[update], there is very significant uncertainty on continuing access to the EU single market after the forthcoming Brexit.[13]
+The currency of Gibraltar is the Gibraltar pound, issued by the Government of Gibraltar under the terms of the 1934 Currency Notes Act. These banknotes are legal tender in Gibraltar alongside Bank of England banknotes.[81][82] In a currency board arrangement, these notes are issued against reserves of sterling.[82][83][84] Clearing and settlement of funds is conducted in sterling.[85] Coins in circulation follow British denominations but have separate designs. Unofficially, most retail outlets in Gibraltar accept the euro, though some payphones and the Royal Gibraltar Post Office, along with all other government offices, do not.[86]
+Gibraltar is one of the most densely populated territories in the world, with a usually-resident population in 2012 of 32,194[87] equivalent to approximately 4,959 inhabitants per square kilometre (12,840/sq mi). The growing demand for space is being increasingly met by land reclamation; reclaimed land makes up approximately one tenth of the territory's total area.
+The demographics of Gibraltar reflect the many European and other economic migrants who came to the Rock over 300 years ago, after almost all of the Spanish population left in 1704.
+Origin of surnames in the electoral roll by percentage is: British (27%), Spanish (26%, mostly Andalusian but also some 2% Menorcan), Genoese and other Italian (15%), Portuguese (15%), and Maltese (8%). There are also small (less than 1%) populations of other groups such as Moroccans, French, Austrians, Chinese, Japanese, Polish and Danish.[88]
+The official language of Gibraltar is English, and is used by the government and in schools. Most locals are bilingual, also speaking Spanish. However, because of the varied mix of ethnic groups which reside there, other languages are also spoken on the Rock. Berber and Arabic are spoken by the Moroccan community, as are Hindi and Sindhi by the Indian community. Maltese is spoken by some families of Maltese descent.[90]
+Gibraltarians often converse in Llanito (pronounced [ʎaˈnito]),[91] a vernacular unique to Gibraltar. It is based on Andalusian Spanish with a strong mixture of British English and elements from languages such as Maltese, Portuguese, Genoese Italian and Haketia (a Judaeo-Spanish dialect). Llanito also often involves code-switching to English and Spanish.
+Gibraltarians often call themselves Llanitos.[92]
+According to the 2012 census, approximately 72.1% of Gibraltarians are Roman Catholics.[93] The 16th century Saint Mary the Crowned is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Gibraltar, and also the oldest Catholic church in the territory. Other Christian denominations include the Church of England (7.7%), whose Cathedral of the Holy Trinity is the cathedral of the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe; the Gibraltar Methodist Church,[94] Church of Scotland, various Pentecostal and independent churches mostly influenced by the House Church and Charismatic movements, as well as a Plymouth Brethren congregation. Several of these congregations are represented by the Gibraltar Evangelical Alliance.
+There is also a ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and two congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses. 7.1% advised that they have no religion.
+The third religion in size is Islam (3.6% of the population). There is also an established Hindu population (2%), members of the Bahá'í Faith and a long-established Jewish community, which, at 763 persons, accounts for 2.4% of the population.[93] As a share of the total population, this is the second-largest Jewish population in the world, trailing only Israel. There are four functioning Orthodox synagogues in Gibraltar and several kosher establishments.
+Education in Gibraltar generally follows the English model, operating within a three tier system. Schools in Gibraltar use the Key Stage modular approach to teach the National Curriculum. Gibraltar has 15 state schools, two private schools and a college of further education, Gibraltar College. Government secondary schools are Bayside Comprehensive School for boys and Westside School for girls, and Prior Park School Gibraltar is an independent coeducational secondary school.[95]
+On 31 March 2015 the government of Gibraltar announced the adoption of the University of Gibraltar Act and The University of Gibraltar opened in September 2015.[96][97] Previously, there were no facilities in Gibraltar for full-time higher education, and consequently, all Gibraltarian students studied elsewhere at degree level or its equivalent and also for certain non-degree courses.[98] The Government of Gibraltar operates a scholarship/grant system to provide funding for students studying in the United Kingdom. All Gibraltarian students used to follow the UK student loans procedure, applying for a loan from the Student Loans Company which was then reimbursed in full by the Government of Gibraltar. In August 2010, this system was replaced by the direct payment by the government of grants and tuition fees. The overwhelming majority of Gibraltarians continue their studies at university level.[citation needed]
+All Gibraltarians are entitled to health care in public wards and clinics at St Bernard's Hospital and primary health care centre. All other British citizens are also entitled to free-of-charge treatment on the Rock on presentation of a valid British passport during stays of up to 30 days. Other EU nationals are equally entitled to treatment on presentation of a valid European Health Insurance Card. Dental treatment and prescribed medicines are free of charge for Gibraltarian students and pensioners.[99]
+The Gibraltar Health Authority, established under the Medical (Gibraltar Health Authority) Act of 1987[100] is funded through the Gibraltar Group Practice Medical Scheme. It employs around 900 people, handling 37,000 A&E attendances, 40,000 outpatient appointments, and 90,000 GP visits a year. Some specialist care is provided by visiting consultants and in UK and Spanish hospitals. First-line medical and nursing services are provided at the Primary Care Centre, which has 16 GPs, with more specialised services available at St Bernard's Hospital, a 210-bed civilian hospital opened in 2005. Psychiatric care is provided by King George V Hospital.
+As of 2012 the authority was responsible for the health of some 27,000 individuals. The GHA and Social Welfare System are closely based upon their British counterparts, namely the National Health Service.[101] As of 2003 the organisation was funded through roughly £19 million ($27 million) of social insurance stamp contributions through the Gibraltar Group Practice Medical Scheme.[102]
+In September 2014 Egton Medical Information Systems won a contract, worth up to £11.25m over 10 years, to deliver an electronic patient record for the health service of Gibraltar including a patient administration system, an emergency department system, e-prescribing and other software from Ascribe, which Emis bought in September 2013.[103]  The A&E unit at St Bernard's Hospital went live on 24 June 2015 using Emis' Symphony and it is planned that  primary and community services and the acute hospital will start to use the Ascribe CaMIS patient administration system.[104]
+A Community Mental Health Team was established in 2017, and in 2018 the Gibraltar Health Authority School of Health Studies introduced a Mental Health Nursing degree to tackle difficulties in recruiting mental health nurses.[105]
+The culture of Gibraltar reflects Gibraltarians' diverse origins. While there are Spanish (mostly from nearby Andalusia) and British influences, the ethnic origins of most Gibraltarians are not confined to these ethnicities. Other ethnicities include Genoese, Maltese, Portuguese, and German. A few other Gibraltar residents are Jewish of Sephardic origin, Moroccan, or Indians. British influence remains strong, with English being the language of government, commerce, education and the media.
+Gibraltar's first sovereignty referendum is celebrated annually on Gibraltar National Day (10 September). It is a public holiday, during which most Gibraltarians dress in their national colours of red and white. Until 2016, the tradition had been to also release 30,000 similarly coloured balloons, which represented the people of Gibraltar. However, this tradition has now been ended because of the threat that it poses to wildlife, particularly marine.[106] The 300th anniversary of Gibraltar's capture was celebrated in 2004 on Tercentenary Day (4 August), when in recognition of and with thanks for its long association with Gibraltar, the Royal Navy was given the Freedom of the City of Gibraltar and a human chain of Gibraltarians dressed in red, white and blue, linked hands to encircle the Rock. On 4 June 2012, the Gibraltar Diamond Jubilee Flotilla, inspired by the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, celebrated sixty years of the Queen's reign.[107]
+The Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation operates a television and radio station on UHF, VHF and medium-wave. The radio service is also internet-streamed. Special events and the daily news bulletin are streamed in video. The other local radio service is operated by the British Forces Broadcasting Service which also provides a limited cable television network to HM Forces. The largest and most frequently published newspaper is the Gibraltar Chronicle, Gibraltar's oldest established daily newspaper and the world's second oldest English language newspaper to have been in print continuously[108] with daily editions six days a week. Panorama is published on weekdays, and 7 Days, The New People, and Gibsport are weekly.
+Native Gibraltarians have produced some literature of note. The first in fiction was probably Héctor Licudi's 1929 novel Barbarita, written in Spanish,[109] chronicling the largely autobiographical adventures of a young Gibraltarian man. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, several anthologies of poetry were published by Leopoldo Sanguinetti, Albert Joseph Patron and Alberto Pizzarello. The 1960s were largely dominated by the theatrical works of Elio Cruz and his two highly acclaimed Spanish language plays La Lola se va pá Londre and Connie con cama camera en el comedor.[citation needed] In the 1990s, the Gibraltarian man-of-letters Mario Arroyo published Profiles (1994), a series of bilingual meditations on love, loneliness and death. Trino Cruz is a bilingual poet originally writing English but now mainly in Spanish, who also translates Maghreb poetry.[110][111][112] Of late there have been works by the essayist Mary Chiappe, such as her volume of essays Cabbages and Kings (2006) and by M. G. Sanchez, author of the books Rock Black: Ten Gibraltarian Stories (2008) and Diary of a Victorian Colonial (2009). Mary Chiappe and Sam Benady have also published a series of detective books centred on the character of the nineteenth-century Gibraltarian sleuth Bresciano.
+Musicians from Gibraltar include Charles Ramirez, the first guitarist invited to play with the Royal College of Music Orchestra,[113] successful rock bands like Breed 77, Melon Diesel and Taxi, while Gibraltarian bassist Glen Diani played for Irish/British nu metal group One Minute Silence. Albert Hammond had top 10 hits in the UK and US and has written many songs for international artists such as Whitney Houston, Tina Turner and Julio Iglesias.[114]
+Gibraltarian cuisine is the result of a long relationship between the Andalusian Spaniards and the British, as well as the many foreigners who made Gibraltar their home over the past three centuries. The culinary influences include those from Malta, Genoa, Portugal, Andalusia and Britain. This marriage of tastes has given Gibraltar an eclectic mix of Mediterranean and British cuisine. Profiteroles, a French choux pastry ball with a sweet filling of whipped cream, is considered to be Gibraltar's national dish.[115] These are often served after a meal including Calentita, a baked bread-like dish made with chickpea flour, water, olive oil, salt and pepper.
+The outbreak of yellow fever in 1804 is the subject of Letitia Elizabeth Landon's 1836 poem  Gibraltar. Scene During the Plague. She published two further poetical illustrations on Gibraltar the following year,  Gibraltar—from the Sea. and  Gibraltar, From the Queen of Spain’s Chair.
+In 2007, there were 18 Gibraltar sports associations with official recognition from their respective international governing bodies. Others have submitted applications for recognition which are being considered. The government supports the many sporting associations financially. Gibraltar also competes in the bi-annual Island Games, which it hosted in 1995 and again in 2019.
+Football is a popular sport in Gibraltar. The Gibraltar Football Association applied for full membership of UEFA, but their bid was turned down in 2007 in a contentious decision.[116]
+Gibraltar was confirmed as UEFA's 54th member on 24 May 2013 as a result of Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arbitration and played in Euro 2016 qualifications.[117][118] Their first match was a 0–0 draw against Slovakia. Gibraltar's national team won its first-ever match in UEFA competition on 13 October 2018, beating Armenia in the 2018–19 UEFA Nations League D.[119]
+Subsequently, Gibraltar applied for FIFA membership but this bid was also turned down. On 2 May 2016 the CAS upheld the appeal filed by the Gibraltar Football Association regarding its request to become a full-time member of FIFA. CAS ordered FIFA to stop blocking Gibraltar's application for membership and allow it "without delay".[120]
+Cricket enjoys popularity in Gibraltar. The Gibraltar national cricket team won the European Cricket Championship Division Two in 2000 and 2002.
+Rugby union is fairly popular and one of the fastest growing team sports. Gibraltar Rugby Football Union applied for membership of Europe's governing body for rugby. Gibraltar is believed to be the birthplace of the rugby variant Tag Rugby.[121][note 2]
+The Gibraltar Rifle Association (GRA) was Gibraltar's most successful team at the 2009 Island Games, earning four gold medals.
+Darts is also a popular sport, with the Gibraltar Darts Association (a full member of World Darts Federation since 1977) running leagues and other regular tournaments. In 2010, Gibraltar hosted and won the Mediterranean Cup, competing against France, Italy, Turkey, Malta and Cyprus.[citation needed]
+Gibraltar has a digital telephone exchange supported by a fibre optic and copper infrastructure; the telephone operator Gibtelecom also operates a GSM network. Internet connectivity is available across the fixed network. Gibraltar's top-level domain code is .gi.
+International Direct Dialling (IDD) is provided, and Gibraltar was allocated the access code +350 by the International Telecommunication Union. This has been finally accepted by Spain since 10 February 2007, when the telecom dispute was resolved.
+Within Gibraltar, the main form of transport is the car. Motorcycles are also very popular and there is a good modern bus service. Unlike in the UK and other British territories, traffic drives on the right and speed limits are in km/h, as the territory shares a land border with Spain. The E15 highway connecting Spain, France, and the United Kingdom is accessible from the Spanish side using the CA-34 autovía.
+There is a Gibraltar Cable Car that runs from ground level to the top of the Rock, with an intermediate station at Apes' Den.
+Restrictions on transport introduced by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco closed the land frontier in 1969 and also prohibited any air or ferry connections. In 1982, the land border was reopened. As the result of an agreement signed in Córdoba on 18 September 2006 between Gibraltar, the United Kingdom and Spain,[122] the Spanish government agreed to relax border controls at the frontier that have plagued locals for decades; in return, Britain paid increased pensions to Spanish workers who lost their jobs when Franco closed the border.[123] Telecommunication restrictions were lifted in February 2007 and air links with Spain were restored in December 2006.[124][125]
+The road border control is the only one between two EU members[clarification needed] that is expected to remain indefinitely. Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania have border controls which are expected to be removed around 2020. Motorists and pedestrians crossing the border with Spain are occasionally subjected to very long delays.[126] Spain has occasionally closed the border during disputes or incidents involving the Gibraltar authorities, such as the Aurora cruise ship incident[127] and when fishermen from the Spanish fishing vessel Piraña were arrested for illegal fishing in Gibraltar waters.[128]
+As of 2017[update], Gibraltar maintains regular flight connections with London (Heathrow, Gatwick & Luton), Manchester and Bristol in the UK, and with Casablanca and Tangier in Morocco.[129]
+GB Airways operated a service between Gibraltar and London and other cities for many years. The airline initially flew under the name "Gibraltar Airways". In 1989, and in anticipation of service to cities outside the UK, Gibraltar Airways changed its name to GB Airways with the belief that a new name would incur fewer political problems. As a franchise, the airline operated flights in full British Airways livery. In 2007, GB Airways was purchased by easyJet,[130] which began operating flights under their name in April 2008 when British Airways re-introduced flights to Gibraltar under their name. EasyJet have since added Bristol and Manchester and also operated flights to Liverpool between 2011 and 2012. Until entering administration in October 2017, Monarch Airlines operated the largest number of flights between the United Kingdom and Gibraltar, with scheduled services between Gibraltar and Luton, London Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester. The Spanish national airline, Iberia, operated a daily service to Madrid which ceased for lack of demand. In May 2009, Ándalus Líneas Aéreas opened a Spanish service,[131] which also ceased operations in March 2010.[132] An annual return charter flight to Malta is operated by Maltese national airline, Air Malta.
+Gibraltar International Airport is unusual not only because of its proximity to the city centre resulting in the airport terminal being within walking distance of much of Gibraltar but also because the runway intersects Winston Churchill Avenue, the main north–south street, requiring movable barricades to close when aircraft land or depart. New roads and a tunnel, which will end the need to stop road traffic when aircraft use the runway, were planned to coincide with the building of a new airport terminal building with an originally estimated completion date of 2009,[133][134] although it has not been completed because of delays.
+The most popular alternative airport for Gibraltar is Málaga Airport in Spain, some 120 kilometres (75 mi) to the east, which offers a wide range of destinations, second to Jerez Airport which is closer to Gibraltar. In addition, the Algeciras Heliport across the bay offers scheduled services to Ceuta.
+Gibraltar Cruise Terminal receives a large number of visits from cruise ships. The Strait of Gibraltar is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
+Passenger and cargo ships anchor in the Gibraltar Harbour. Also, a ferry links Gibraltar with Tangier in Morocco. The ferry between Gibraltar and Algeciras, which had been halted in 1969 when Franco severed communications with Gibraltar, was finally reopened on 16 December 2009, served by the Spanish company Transcoma.[135]
+Ferries by FRS running twice a week from Gibraltar to Tanger-Med port provide access to the Moroccan railway system.[136][137]
+While railway track extends to the outskirts of La Línea from an aborted rail expansion project in the 1970s,[138][139] the closest railway station in Spain is San Roque station, accessible via buses from La Línea.
+Water supply and sanitation in Gibraltar have been major concerns for its inhabitants throughout its history. There are no rivers, streams, or large bodies of water on the peninsula. Gibraltar's water supply was formerly provided by a combination of an aqueduct, wells, and the use of cisterns, barrels and earthenware pots to capture rainwater. This became increasingly inadequate as Gibraltar's population grew in the 18th and 19th centuries and lethal diseases such as cholera and yellow fever began to spread. In the late 19th century, a Sanitary Commission instigated major improvements which saw the introduction of large-scale desalination and the use of giant water catchments covering over 2.5 million square feet (nearly 250,000 m2). Today Gibraltar's supply of drinking water comes entirely from desalination, with a separate supply of saltwater for sanitary purposes. Both supplies are delivered from huge underground reservoirs excavated under the Rock of Gibraltar.
+The Royal Gibraltar Police (RGP), Gibraltar Defence Police (GDP) and Her Majesty's Customs (Gibraltar) are Gibraltar's principal civilian law enforcement agencies. Outside the United Kingdom, the RGP is the oldest police force of the former British Empire, formed shortly after the creation of London's Metropolitan Police in 1829 when Gibraltar was declared a crown colony on 25 June 1830.[140]
+In general, the Gibraltar force follows British police models in its dress and its mostly male constables and sergeants on foot patrol wear the traditional custodian helmet, the headgear of the British "bobby on the beat". The helmet is traditionally made of cork covered outside by felt or serge-like material that matches the tunic. The vehicles also appear virtually identical to typical UK police vehicles, but are left hand drive.
+The force, whose name received the prefix "Royal" in 1992, numbers over 220 officers divided into a number of units. These include the CID, drug squad, special branch, firearms, scene of crime examiners, traffic, marine and operations units, sections or departments.
+On 24 September 2015, the Freedom of the City of Gibraltar was conferred upon the RGP by the Mayor, Adolfo Canepa.
+Gibraltar's defence is the responsibility of the United Kingdom tri-services British Forces Gibraltar. In January 2007, the Ministry of Defence announced that the private company Serco would provide services to the base. The announcement resulted in the affected trade unions striking.
+Gibraltar has an important role in UKSIGINT and provides a vital strategic part of the United Kingdom communications gathering and monitoring network in the Mediterranean and North Africa.[144][145]
+Merlin HC3 of 846 NAS with HMS Scimitar
+The Royal Navy's base in Gibraltar
+Culture:Anglosphere
+Coordinates: 36°07′54″N 05°21′06″W / 36.13167°N 5.35167°W / 36.13167; -5.35167

en/2202.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,145 @@

+GIMP (/ɡɪmp/ GHIMP; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor[4] used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.
+GIMP is released under GPLv3+ license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
+In 1995 Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began developing GIMP as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley for the eXperimental Computing Facility; they named it the General Image Manipulation Program.[5] The acronym was coined first, with the letter G being added to "IMP" as a reference to "the gimp" in a scene in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction.[6] In 1996 GIMP (0.54) was released as the first publicly available release.[7][8] In the following year Kimball and Mattis met with Richard Stallman of the GNU Project while he visited UC Berkeley and asked if they could change General in the application's name to GNU (the name given to the operating system created by Stallman), and Stallman approved.[9]  The application subsequently formed part of the GNU software collection.[10]
+The number of computer architectures and operating systems supported has expanded significantly since its first release. The first release supported UNIX systems, such as Linux, SGI IRIX and HP-UX.[5][11] Since the initial release, GIMP has been ported to many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and macOS; the original port to the Windows 32-bit platform was started by Finnish programmer Tor M. Lillqvist (tml) in 1997 and was supported in the GIMP 1.1 release.[11]
+Following the first release, GIMP was quickly adopted and a community of contributors formed. The community began developing tutorials, artwork and shared better work-flows and techniques.[12]
+A GUI toolkit called GTK (GIMP tool kit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. GTK was replaced by its successor GTK+ after being redesigned using object-oriented programming techniques. The development of GTK+ has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif toolkit GIMP originally used; Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60.[8][13]
+GIMP 0.54 was released in January 1996.[26][27] It required X11 displays, an X-server that supported the X shared memory extension and Motif 1.2 widgets. It supported 8, 15, 16 and 24-bit color depths, dithering for 8-bit displays and could view images as RGB color, grayscale or indexed color. It could simultaneously edit multiple images, zoom and pan in real-time, and supported GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and XPM images.[28]
+At this early stage of development GIMP could select regions using rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier, and intelligent selection tools, and rotate, scale, shear and flip images. It had bucket, brush and airbrush painting tools, and could clone, convolve, and blend images. It had text tools, effects filters (such as blur and edge detect), and channel and color operations (such as add, composite, decompose). The plugin system allowed for addition of new file formats and new effect filters. It supported multiple undo and redo operations.[28]
+It ran on Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HP-UX 9.05, and SGI IRIX operating systems.[28] It was rapidly adopted by users,[29][30]
+who created tutorials, displayed artwork and shared techniques.[26][27] An early success for GIMP was the Linux penguin Tux, as drawn by Larry Ewing using GIMP 0.54.[31] By 5 July 1996 the volume of messages posted to the mailing list had risen and the mailing list was split into two lists, gimp-developer and gimp-user. Currently, user questions are directed to the gimpnet IRC channel.[26][27]
+GIMP 0.60 was released on 6 June 1997[32] using the GNU General Public License.[33]
+According to the release notes, Peter Mattis was working for Hewlett-Packard and Spencer Kimball was working as a Java programmer.[34]
+GIMP 0.60 no longer depended on the Motif toolkit. Improvements had been made to the painting tools, airbrush, channel operations, palettes, blend tool modes, image panning and transformation tools. The editing work flow was improved by enabling rulers, cutting and pasting between all image types, cloning between all image types and ongoing development of a layers dialog.
+New tools included new brushes (and a new brush file format), grayscale and RGB transparency, "bucket fill" patterns and a pattern selection dialog, integrated paint modes, border, feather and color selectors, a pencil and eraser paint tool, gamma adjustments and a limited layer move tool.
+The new widgets were managed by Peter Mattis and were called GTK for GIMP toolkit and GDK for GIMP drawing kit.[34]
+Sometime in 1998, after a few humorous suggestions of a gimp compile on Microsoft Windows, Tor Lilqvist began the effort of the initial port of GIMP for Windows.  At the time it was considered a code fork.  It would later be merged into the main development tree.  Support was, and continues to be, offered through a yahoogroups email list.
+The biggest change in the GIMP 0.99 release was in the GIMP toolkit (GTK). GTK was redesigned to be object oriented and renamed from GTK to GTK+. The pace of development slowed when Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis found employment.[26][27]
+GIMP 1.0.0 was released on 2 June 1998.[35]
+GIMP and GTK+ split into separate projects during the GIMP 1.0 release. GIMP 1.0 included a new tile-based memory management system, which enabled editing of larger images, and a change in the plug-in API (Application programming interface) allowed scripts to be safely called from other scripts and to be self documenting. GIMP 1.0 also introduced a native file format (xcf) with support for layers, guides and selections (active channels).
+An official website was constructed for GIMP during the 1.0 series, designed by Adrian Likins and Jens Lautenbacher, now found at classic.gimp.org which provided introductory tutorials and additional resources.[36] On 13 April 1997, GIMP News was started by Zach Beane, a site that announced plug-ins, tutorials and articles written about GIMP. May 1997, Seth Burgess started GIMP Bugs, the first 'electronic bug list'.[26][27]
+Marc Lehmann[37] developed a perl programming plug-in.[38][39][40] Web interfaces were possible with the GIMP 1.0 series, and GIMP Net-fu[41]
+can still be used for online graphics generation.[42]
+The GIMP 1.1 series focused on fixing bugs and improving the port to Windows. No official release occurred during this series. Following this the odd numbered series (e.g. 1.1) of GIMP releases were considered unstable development releases and even numbered releases (e.g. 1.2) were considered stable releases. By this time, GTK+ had become a significant project and many of GIMP's original developers turned to GTK+ development. These included Owen Taylor (author of GIMP ifsCompose),[43]
+Federico Mena,[44] Tim Janik,[45] Shawn Amundson and others. GNOME also attracted GIMP developers. The primary GIMP developers during this period were Manish Singh, Michael Natterer[46]
+Sven Neumann[47]
+and Tor Lillqvist[47]
+who primarily fixed issues so that GIMP could run on Win32.[48]
+GIMP 1.2.0 was released on 25 December 2000 (in time for that Christmas). GIMP 1.2 had a new development team of Manish Singh, Sven Neumann and Michael Natterer and others. GIMP 1.2 offered internationalization options, improved installation dialogs, many bug fixes (in GIMP and GTK+), overhauled plug-ins, reduced memory leaks and reorganized menus.[49]
+New plug-ins included GIMPressionist and Sphere Designer by Vidar Madsen;[50] Image Map by Maurits Rijk;[51]
+GFlare by Eiichi Takamori; Warp by John P. Beale, Stephen Robert Norris and Federico Mena Quintero; and Sample Colorize and Curve Bend by Wolfgang Hofer. New tools included a new path tool, a new airbrush tool, a resizable toolbox, enhanced pressure support, a measure tool, dodge, burn and smudge tools. New functionality included image pipes, jpeg save preview, a new image navigation window, scaled brush previews, selection to path, drag'n'drop, quickmask, a help browser, tear-off menus and the waterselect plug-in was integrated into the color-selector.[49]
+The 1.2 series was the final GIMP 1 series.
+GIMP 2.0.0 was released on 23 March 2004. The biggest visible change was the transition to the GTK+ 2.x toolkit.
+Among the major changes in GIMP 2.2 are:[52]
+Major revisions in interface and tools were made available with the GIMP 2.4.0 release on 24 October 2007. Rewritten selection tools, use of the Tango style guidelines for a polished UI on all platforms, a foreground selection tool, and support for the ABR brush filetype along with the ability to resize brushes were some of the many updates.
+More major revisions in interface and tools were made available with the 2.6.0 release on 1 October 2008. There were large changes in the UI, free select tool and brush tools, and lesser changes in the code base. Also, partial tool level integration of GEGL was enacted that is supposed to lead to higher color depths as well as non-destructive editing in future versions.[53]
+Starting from the first bugfix version, GIMP 2.6.1, "The Utility Window Hint", that enforced MDI behavior on Microsoft Windows, as opposed to only being supported in GNOME.
+GIMP 2.8 was released on 3 May 2012 with several revisions to the user interface. These include a redesigned save/export menu that aims to reinforce the idea that information is lost when exporting. The text tool was also redesigned so that a user edits text on canvas instead of in a separate dialog window. This feature was one of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects from 2006.
+GIMP 2.8 also features layer groups, simple math in size entry fields, JPEG2000 support, PDF export, a webpage screenshot utility, and a single-window mode.[54]
+GEGL has also received its first stable release (0.1), where the Application Programming Interface is considered mostly stable; GEGL has continued to be integrated into GIMP, now handling layer projection, this is a major step forward into full integration of GEGL that will allow GIMP to have better non-destructive work-flows in future releases. GEGL 0.2.0 is integrated into 2.8.xx.
+GIMP 2.10.0 was released on 27 April 2018.[55]
+The team allowed for new features to enter stable releases:[56]
+GIMP 3.0 will be the first release ported to GTK3. It had been developed in parallel to 2.9, but with low priority until the release of 2.10. Cleaning of code is now one of the focus areas of development. Version 2.99.2 will be the first public development version of 3.0 and is likely to be available in 2020.[61]
+Non-destructive editing is the main focus in this future version.[62]
+GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers as a free and open source software project associated with both the GNU and GNOME projects. Development takes place in a public git source code repository,[63] on public mailing lists and in public chat channels on the GIMPNET IRC network.[64]
+New features are held in public separate source code branches and merged into the main (or development) branch when the GIMP team is sure they won't damage existing functions.[63] Sometimes this means that features that appear complete do not get merged or take months or years before they become available in GIMP.
+GIMP itself is released as source code. After a source code release installers and packages are made for different operating systems by parties who might not be in contact with the maintainers of GIMP.
+The version number used in GIMP is expressed in a major-minor-micro format, with each number carrying a specific meaning: the first (major) number is incremented only for major developments (and is currently 2). The second (minor) number is incremented with each release of new features, with odd numbers reserved for in-progress development versions and even numbers assigned to stable releases; the third (micro) number is incremented before and after each release (resulting in even numbers for releases, and odd numbers for development snapshots) with any bug fixes subsequently applied and released for a stable version.
+Each year GIMP applies for several positions in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC);[65][66] to date GIMP has participated in all years except 2007.[67] From 2006 to 2009 there have been nine GSoC projects that have been listed as successful,[65] although not all successful projects have been merged into GIMP immediately. The healing brush and perspective clone tools and Ruby bindings were created as part of the 2006 GSoC and can be used in version 2.8.0 of GIMP, although there were three other projects that were completed and are later available in a stable version of GIMP; those projects being Vector Layers (end 2008 in 2.8 and master),[68] and a JPEG 2000 plug-in (mid 2009 in 2.8 and master).[69]
+Several of the GSoC projects were completed in 2008, but have been merged into a stable GIMP release later in 2009 to 2014 for Version 2.8.xx and 2.9.x. Some of them needed some more code work for the master tree.
+Second public Development 2.9-Version was 2.9.4 with many deep improvements after initial Public Version 2.9.2.[70][71] Third Public 2.9-Development version is Version 2.9.6.[72] One of the new features is removing the 4GB size limit of XCF file.[73][74]
+Increase of possible threads to 64 is also an important point for modern parallel execution in actual AMD Ryzen and Intel Xeon processors. Version 2.9.8 included many bug fixes and improvements in gradients and clips.[75] Improvements in performance and optimization beyond bug hunting were the development targets for 2.10.0.[76] MacOS Beta is available with Version 2.10.4 [77]
+The next stable version in the roadmap is 3.0 with a GTK3 port.[78]
+The user interface of GIMP is designed by a dedicated design and usability team. This team was formed after the developers of GIMP signed up to join the OpenUsability project.[79] A user-interface brainstorming group has since been created for GIMP,[80][81] where users of GIMP can send in their suggestions as to how they think the GIMP user interface could be improved.
+GIMP is presented in two forms, single and multiple window mode;[82] GIMP 2.8 defaults to the multiple-window mode.  In multiple-window mode a set of windows contains all GIMP's functionality. By default, tools and tool settings are on the left and other dialogues are on the right.[83] A layers tab is often to the right of the tools tab, and allows a user to work individually on separate image layers. Layers can be edited by right-clicking on a particular layer to bring up edit options for that layer. The tools tab and layers tab are the most common dockable tabs.[citation needed]
+The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is a yearly event where developers of GIMP and other projects meet up to discuss issues related to free and open-source graphics software. The GIMP developers hold birds of a feather (BOF) sessions at this event.
+The current version of GIMP works with numerous operating systems, including Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows. Many Linux distributions include GIMP as a part of their desktop operating systems, including Fedora and Debian.
+The GIMP website links to binary installers compiled by Jernej Simončič for the platform.[84] MacPorts was listed as the recommended provider of Mac builds of GIMP,[85] but this is no longer needed as version 2.8.2 and later run natively on macOS.[86] GTK+ was originally designed to run on an X11 server.  Because macOS can optionally use an X11 server, porting GIMP to macOS is simpler compared to creating a Windows port.  GIMP is also available as part of the Ubuntu noroot package from the Google Play Store on Android.[87] In November 2013, GIMP removed its download from SourceForge, citing misleading download buttons that potentially confuse customers, as well as SourceForge's own Windows installer, which bundles potentially unwanted programs. In a statement, GIMP called SourceForge a once "useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications" that now faces "a problem with the ads they allow on their sites ..."[88][89][90]
+GIMP, who discontinued their use of SourceForge as a download mirror site in November 2013,[88][91] reported in May 2015 that SourceForge was hosting infected versions of their Windows binaries on the site's Open Source Mirror directory.[92][93]
+Lifewire reviewed GIMP favorably in March 2019, writing that "(f)or those who have never experienced Photoshop, GIMP is simply a very powerful image manipulation program," and "(i)f you're willing to invest some time learning it, it can be a very good graphics tool."[94]
+GIMP's fitness for use in professional environments is regularly reviewed; it is often compared to and suggested as a possible replacement for Adobe Photoshop.[95][96] GIMP has similar functionality to Photoshop, but has a different user interface.[97]
+GIMP 2.6 was used to create nearly all of the art in Lucas the Game, an independent video game by developer Timothy Courtney. Courtney started development of Lucas the Game in early 2014, and the video game was published in July 2015 for PC and Mac. Courtney explains GIMP is a powerful tool, fully capable of large professional projects, such as video games.[98]
+The single-window mode introduced in GIMP 2.8 was reviewed in 2012 by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, who noted that it made the user experience feel "more streamlined and less cluttered".[99] Michael Burns, writing for Macworld in 2014, described the single-window interface of GIMP 2.8.10 as a "big improvement".[100]
+In his review of GIMP for ExtremeTech in October 2013, David Cardinal noted that GIMP's reputation of being hard to use and lacking features has "changed dramatically over the last couple years", and that it was "no longer a crippled alternative to Photoshop". He described GIMP's scripting as one of its strengths, but also remarked that some of Photoshop's features –  such as Text, 3D commands, Adjustment Layers and History –  are either less powerful or missing in GIMP. Cardinal favorably described the UFRaw converter for raw images used with GIMP, noting that it still "requires some patience to figure out how to use those more advanced capabilities". Cardinal stated that GIMP is "easy enough to try" despite not having as well developed documentation and help system as those for Photoshop, concluding that it "has become a worthy alternative to Photoshop for anyone on a budget who doesn't need all of Photoshop's vast feature set".[101]
+Wilber is the official GIMP mascot. Wilber has relevance outside of GIMP as a racer in SuperTuxKart and was displayed on the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) as part of Project Blinkenlights.[102][103][104]
+Wilber was created at some time before 25 September 1997 by Tuomas Kuosmanen (tigert) and has since received additional accessories and a construction kit to ease the process.[105]
+Tools used to perform image editing can be accessed via the toolbox, through menus and dialogue windows. They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.
+There are several ways of selecting colors, including palettes, color choosers and using an eyedropper tool to select a colour on the canvas. The built-in color choosers include RGB/HSV selector or scales, water-color selector, CMYK selector and a color-wheel selector. Colors can also be selected using hexadecimal color codes as used in HTML color selection. GIMP has native support for indexed colour and RGB color spaces; other color spaces are supported using decomposition where each channel of the new color space becomes a black-and-white image. CMYK, LAB and HSV (hue, saturation, value) are supported this way.[106][107] Color blending can be achieved using the Blend tool, by applying a gradient to the surface of an image and using GIMP's color modes. Gradients are also integrated into tools such as the brush tool, when the user paints this way the output color slowly changes. There are a number of default gradients included with GIMP; a user can also create custom gradients with tools provided. Gradient plug-ins are also available.
+GIMP selection tools include a rectangular and circular selection tool, free select tool, and fuzzy select tool (also known as magic wand). More advanced selection tools include the select by color tool for selecting contiguous regions of color—and the scissors select tool, which creates selections semi-automatically between areas of highly contrasting colors. GIMP also supports a quick mask mode where a user can use a brush to paint the area of a selection.  Visibly this looks like a red colored overlay being added or removed. The foreground select tool is an implementation of Simple Interactive Object Extraction (SIOX) a method used to perform the extraction of foreground elements, such as a person or a tree in focus. The Paths Tool allows a user to create vectors (also known as Bézier curves). Users can use paths to create complex selections, including around natural curves. They can paint (or "stroke") the paths with brushes, patterns, or various line styles. Users can name and save paths for reuse.
+There are many tools that can be used for editing images in GIMP. The more common tools include a paint brush, pencil, airbrush, eraser and ink tools used to create new or blended pixels. The Bucket Fill tool can be used to fill a selection with a color or pattern. The Blend tool can be used to fill a selection with a color gradient. These color transitions can be applied to large regions or smaller custom path selections.
+GIMP also provides "smart" tools that use a more complex algorithm to do things that otherwise would be time-consuming or impossible. These include:
+An image being edited in GIMP can consist of many layers in a stack. The user manual suggests that "A good way to visualize a GIMP image is as a stack of transparencies," where in GIMP terminology, each level (analogous to a transparency) is called a layer.[108] Each layer in an image is made up of several channels. In an RGB image, there are normally 3 or 4 channels, each consisting of a red, green and blue channel. Color sublayers look like slightly different gray images, but when put together they make a complete image. The fourth channel that may be part of a layer is the alpha channel (or layer mask). This channel measures opacity where a whole or part of an image can be completely visible, partially visible or invisible. Each layer has a layer mode that can be set to change the colors in the image.[109]
+Text layers can be created using the text tool, allowing a user to write on an image. Text layers can be transformed in several ways, such as converting them to a path or selection.[110][111]
+GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion Blur and Noise.
+GIMP operations can be automated with scripting languages. The Script-Fu is a Scheme-based language implemented using a TinyScheme interpreter built into GIMP.[112] GIMP can also be scripted in Perl,[113][114] Python (Python-Fu),[115][116] or Tcl, using interpreters external to GIMP.[117] New features can be added to GIMP not only by changing program code (GIMP core), but also by creating plug-ins. These are external programs that are executed and controlled by the main GIMP program.[118][119] MathMap is an example of a plug-in written in C.
+There is support for several methods of sharpening and blurring images, including the blur and sharpen tool. The unsharp mask tool is used to sharpen an image selectively — it sharpens only those areas of an image that are sufficiently detailed. The Unsharp Mask tool is considered to give more targeted results for photographs than a normal sharpening filter.[120][121] The Selective Gaussian Blur tool works in a similar way, except it blurs areas of an image with little detail.
+The Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) was first introduced as part of GIMP on the 2.6 release of GIMP. This initial introduction does not yet exploit all of the capabilities of GEGL; as of the 2.6 release, GIMP can use GEGL to perform high bit-depth color operations; because of this less information is lost when performing color operations.[122] When GEGL is fully integrated, GIMP will have a higher color bit depth and better non-destructive work-flow. GIMP 2.8.xx supports only 8-bit of color, which is much less than what e.g. digital cameras produce (12-bit or more). Full support for high bit depth is included with GIMP 2.10. OpenCL enables hardware acceleration for some operations.[123]
+GIMP supports importing and exporting with a large number of different file formats,[124] GIMP's native format XCF is designed to store all information GIMP can contain about an image; XCF is named after the eXperimental Computing Facility where GIMP was authored.  Import and export capability can be extended to additional file formats by means of plug-ins. XCF file size is extended to more than 4 GB since 2.9.6 and new stable tree 2.10.x.
+Because of the free and open-source nature of GIMP, several forks, variants and derivatives of the computer program have been created to fit the needs of their creators. While GIMP is cross-platform, variants of GIMP may not be. These variants are neither hosted nor linked on the GIMP site.  The GIMP site does not host GIMP builds for Windows or Unix-like operating systems either, although it does include a link to a Windows build.
+Variants include:

en/2203.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,145 @@

+GIMP (/ɡɪmp/ GHIMP; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor[4] used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.
+GIMP is released under GPLv3+ license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
+In 1995 Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis began developing GIMP as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley for the eXperimental Computing Facility; they named it the General Image Manipulation Program.[5] The acronym was coined first, with the letter G being added to "IMP" as a reference to "the gimp" in a scene in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction.[6] In 1996 GIMP (0.54) was released as the first publicly available release.[7][8] In the following year Kimball and Mattis met with Richard Stallman of the GNU Project while he visited UC Berkeley and asked if they could change General in the application's name to GNU (the name given to the operating system created by Stallman), and Stallman approved.[9]  The application subsequently formed part of the GNU software collection.[10]
+The number of computer architectures and operating systems supported has expanded significantly since its first release. The first release supported UNIX systems, such as Linux, SGI IRIX and HP-UX.[5][11] Since the initial release, GIMP has been ported to many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and macOS; the original port to the Windows 32-bit platform was started by Finnish programmer Tor M. Lillqvist (tml) in 1997 and was supported in the GIMP 1.1 release.[11]
+Following the first release, GIMP was quickly adopted and a community of contributors formed. The community began developing tutorials, artwork and shared better work-flows and techniques.[12]
+A GUI toolkit called GTK (GIMP tool kit) was developed to facilitate the development of GIMP. GTK was replaced by its successor GTK+ after being redesigned using object-oriented programming techniques. The development of GTK+ has been attributed to Peter Mattis becoming disenchanted with the Motif toolkit GIMP originally used; Motif was used up until GIMP 0.60.[8][13]
+GIMP 0.54 was released in January 1996.[26][27] It required X11 displays, an X-server that supported the X shared memory extension and Motif 1.2 widgets. It supported 8, 15, 16 and 24-bit color depths, dithering for 8-bit displays and could view images as RGB color, grayscale or indexed color. It could simultaneously edit multiple images, zoom and pan in real-time, and supported GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and XPM images.[28]
+At this early stage of development GIMP could select regions using rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy, bezier, and intelligent selection tools, and rotate, scale, shear and flip images. It had bucket, brush and airbrush painting tools, and could clone, convolve, and blend images. It had text tools, effects filters (such as blur and edge detect), and channel and color operations (such as add, composite, decompose). The plugin system allowed for addition of new file formats and new effect filters. It supported multiple undo and redo operations.[28]
+It ran on Linux 1.2.13, Solaris 2.4, HP-UX 9.05, and SGI IRIX operating systems.[28] It was rapidly adopted by users,[29][30]
+who created tutorials, displayed artwork and shared techniques.[26][27] An early success for GIMP was the Linux penguin Tux, as drawn by Larry Ewing using GIMP 0.54.[31] By 5 July 1996 the volume of messages posted to the mailing list had risen and the mailing list was split into two lists, gimp-developer and gimp-user. Currently, user questions are directed to the gimpnet IRC channel.[26][27]
+GIMP 0.60 was released on 6 June 1997[32] using the GNU General Public License.[33]
+According to the release notes, Peter Mattis was working for Hewlett-Packard and Spencer Kimball was working as a Java programmer.[34]
+GIMP 0.60 no longer depended on the Motif toolkit. Improvements had been made to the painting tools, airbrush, channel operations, palettes, blend tool modes, image panning and transformation tools. The editing work flow was improved by enabling rulers, cutting and pasting between all image types, cloning between all image types and ongoing development of a layers dialog.
+New tools included new brushes (and a new brush file format), grayscale and RGB transparency, "bucket fill" patterns and a pattern selection dialog, integrated paint modes, border, feather and color selectors, a pencil and eraser paint tool, gamma adjustments and a limited layer move tool.
+The new widgets were managed by Peter Mattis and were called GTK for GIMP toolkit and GDK for GIMP drawing kit.[34]
+Sometime in 1998, after a few humorous suggestions of a gimp compile on Microsoft Windows, Tor Lilqvist began the effort of the initial port of GIMP for Windows.  At the time it was considered a code fork.  It would later be merged into the main development tree.  Support was, and continues to be, offered through a yahoogroups email list.
+The biggest change in the GIMP 0.99 release was in the GIMP toolkit (GTK). GTK was redesigned to be object oriented and renamed from GTK to GTK+. The pace of development slowed when Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis found employment.[26][27]
+GIMP 1.0.0 was released on 2 June 1998.[35]
+GIMP and GTK+ split into separate projects during the GIMP 1.0 release. GIMP 1.0 included a new tile-based memory management system, which enabled editing of larger images, and a change in the plug-in API (Application programming interface) allowed scripts to be safely called from other scripts and to be self documenting. GIMP 1.0 also introduced a native file format (xcf) with support for layers, guides and selections (active channels).
+An official website was constructed for GIMP during the 1.0 series, designed by Adrian Likins and Jens Lautenbacher, now found at classic.gimp.org which provided introductory tutorials and additional resources.[36] On 13 April 1997, GIMP News was started by Zach Beane, a site that announced plug-ins, tutorials and articles written about GIMP. May 1997, Seth Burgess started GIMP Bugs, the first 'electronic bug list'.[26][27]
+Marc Lehmann[37] developed a perl programming plug-in.[38][39][40] Web interfaces were possible with the GIMP 1.0 series, and GIMP Net-fu[41]
+can still be used for online graphics generation.[42]
+The GIMP 1.1 series focused on fixing bugs and improving the port to Windows. No official release occurred during this series. Following this the odd numbered series (e.g. 1.1) of GIMP releases were considered unstable development releases and even numbered releases (e.g. 1.2) were considered stable releases. By this time, GTK+ had become a significant project and many of GIMP's original developers turned to GTK+ development. These included Owen Taylor (author of GIMP ifsCompose),[43]
+Federico Mena,[44] Tim Janik,[45] Shawn Amundson and others. GNOME also attracted GIMP developers. The primary GIMP developers during this period were Manish Singh, Michael Natterer[46]
+Sven Neumann[47]
+and Tor Lillqvist[47]
+who primarily fixed issues so that GIMP could run on Win32.[48]
+GIMP 1.2.0 was released on 25 December 2000 (in time for that Christmas). GIMP 1.2 had a new development team of Manish Singh, Sven Neumann and Michael Natterer and others. GIMP 1.2 offered internationalization options, improved installation dialogs, many bug fixes (in GIMP and GTK+), overhauled plug-ins, reduced memory leaks and reorganized menus.[49]
+New plug-ins included GIMPressionist and Sphere Designer by Vidar Madsen;[50] Image Map by Maurits Rijk;[51]
+GFlare by Eiichi Takamori; Warp by John P. Beale, Stephen Robert Norris and Federico Mena Quintero; and Sample Colorize and Curve Bend by Wolfgang Hofer. New tools included a new path tool, a new airbrush tool, a resizable toolbox, enhanced pressure support, a measure tool, dodge, burn and smudge tools. New functionality included image pipes, jpeg save preview, a new image navigation window, scaled brush previews, selection to path, drag'n'drop, quickmask, a help browser, tear-off menus and the waterselect plug-in was integrated into the color-selector.[49]
+The 1.2 series was the final GIMP 1 series.
+GIMP 2.0.0 was released on 23 March 2004. The biggest visible change was the transition to the GTK+ 2.x toolkit.
+Among the major changes in GIMP 2.2 are:[52]
+Major revisions in interface and tools were made available with the GIMP 2.4.0 release on 24 October 2007. Rewritten selection tools, use of the Tango style guidelines for a polished UI on all platforms, a foreground selection tool, and support for the ABR brush filetype along with the ability to resize brushes were some of the many updates.
+More major revisions in interface and tools were made available with the 2.6.0 release on 1 October 2008. There were large changes in the UI, free select tool and brush tools, and lesser changes in the code base. Also, partial tool level integration of GEGL was enacted that is supposed to lead to higher color depths as well as non-destructive editing in future versions.[53]
+Starting from the first bugfix version, GIMP 2.6.1, "The Utility Window Hint", that enforced MDI behavior on Microsoft Windows, as opposed to only being supported in GNOME.
+GIMP 2.8 was released on 3 May 2012 with several revisions to the user interface. These include a redesigned save/export menu that aims to reinforce the idea that information is lost when exporting. The text tool was also redesigned so that a user edits text on canvas instead of in a separate dialog window. This feature was one of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects from 2006.
+GIMP 2.8 also features layer groups, simple math in size entry fields, JPEG2000 support, PDF export, a webpage screenshot utility, and a single-window mode.[54]
+GEGL has also received its first stable release (0.1), where the Application Programming Interface is considered mostly stable; GEGL has continued to be integrated into GIMP, now handling layer projection, this is a major step forward into full integration of GEGL that will allow GIMP to have better non-destructive work-flows in future releases. GEGL 0.2.0 is integrated into 2.8.xx.
+GIMP 2.10.0 was released on 27 April 2018.[55]
+The team allowed for new features to enter stable releases:[56]
+GIMP 3.0 will be the first release ported to GTK3. It had been developed in parallel to 2.9, but with low priority until the release of 2.10. Cleaning of code is now one of the focus areas of development. Version 2.99.2 will be the first public development version of 3.0 and is likely to be available in 2020.[61]
+Non-destructive editing is the main focus in this future version.[62]
+GIMP is primarily developed by volunteers as a free and open source software project associated with both the GNU and GNOME projects. Development takes place in a public git source code repository,[63] on public mailing lists and in public chat channels on the GIMPNET IRC network.[64]
+New features are held in public separate source code branches and merged into the main (or development) branch when the GIMP team is sure they won't damage existing functions.[63] Sometimes this means that features that appear complete do not get merged or take months or years before they become available in GIMP.
+GIMP itself is released as source code. After a source code release installers and packages are made for different operating systems by parties who might not be in contact with the maintainers of GIMP.
+The version number used in GIMP is expressed in a major-minor-micro format, with each number carrying a specific meaning: the first (major) number is incremented only for major developments (and is currently 2). The second (minor) number is incremented with each release of new features, with odd numbers reserved for in-progress development versions and even numbers assigned to stable releases; the third (micro) number is incremented before and after each release (resulting in even numbers for releases, and odd numbers for development snapshots) with any bug fixes subsequently applied and released for a stable version.
+Each year GIMP applies for several positions in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC);[65][66] to date GIMP has participated in all years except 2007.[67] From 2006 to 2009 there have been nine GSoC projects that have been listed as successful,[65] although not all successful projects have been merged into GIMP immediately. The healing brush and perspective clone tools and Ruby bindings were created as part of the 2006 GSoC and can be used in version 2.8.0 of GIMP, although there were three other projects that were completed and are later available in a stable version of GIMP; those projects being Vector Layers (end 2008 in 2.8 and master),[68] and a JPEG 2000 plug-in (mid 2009 in 2.8 and master).[69]
+Several of the GSoC projects were completed in 2008, but have been merged into a stable GIMP release later in 2009 to 2014 for Version 2.8.xx and 2.9.x. Some of them needed some more code work for the master tree.
+Second public Development 2.9-Version was 2.9.4 with many deep improvements after initial Public Version 2.9.2.[70][71] Third Public 2.9-Development version is Version 2.9.6.[72] One of the new features is removing the 4GB size limit of XCF file.[73][74]
+Increase of possible threads to 64 is also an important point for modern parallel execution in actual AMD Ryzen and Intel Xeon processors. Version 2.9.8 included many bug fixes and improvements in gradients and clips.[75] Improvements in performance and optimization beyond bug hunting were the development targets for 2.10.0.[76] MacOS Beta is available with Version 2.10.4 [77]
+The next stable version in the roadmap is 3.0 with a GTK3 port.[78]
+The user interface of GIMP is designed by a dedicated design and usability team. This team was formed after the developers of GIMP signed up to join the OpenUsability project.[79] A user-interface brainstorming group has since been created for GIMP,[80][81] where users of GIMP can send in their suggestions as to how they think the GIMP user interface could be improved.
+GIMP is presented in two forms, single and multiple window mode;[82] GIMP 2.8 defaults to the multiple-window mode.  In multiple-window mode a set of windows contains all GIMP's functionality. By default, tools and tool settings are on the left and other dialogues are on the right.[83] A layers tab is often to the right of the tools tab, and allows a user to work individually on separate image layers. Layers can be edited by right-clicking on a particular layer to bring up edit options for that layer. The tools tab and layers tab are the most common dockable tabs.[citation needed]
+The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is a yearly event where developers of GIMP and other projects meet up to discuss issues related to free and open-source graphics software. The GIMP developers hold birds of a feather (BOF) sessions at this event.
+The current version of GIMP works with numerous operating systems, including Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows. Many Linux distributions include GIMP as a part of their desktop operating systems, including Fedora and Debian.
+The GIMP website links to binary installers compiled by Jernej Simončič for the platform.[84] MacPorts was listed as the recommended provider of Mac builds of GIMP,[85] but this is no longer needed as version 2.8.2 and later run natively on macOS.[86] GTK+ was originally designed to run on an X11 server.  Because macOS can optionally use an X11 server, porting GIMP to macOS is simpler compared to creating a Windows port.  GIMP is also available as part of the Ubuntu noroot package from the Google Play Store on Android.[87] In November 2013, GIMP removed its download from SourceForge, citing misleading download buttons that potentially confuse customers, as well as SourceForge's own Windows installer, which bundles potentially unwanted programs. In a statement, GIMP called SourceForge a once "useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications" that now faces "a problem with the ads they allow on their sites ..."[88][89][90]
+GIMP, who discontinued their use of SourceForge as a download mirror site in November 2013,[88][91] reported in May 2015 that SourceForge was hosting infected versions of their Windows binaries on the site's Open Source Mirror directory.[92][93]
+Lifewire reviewed GIMP favorably in March 2019, writing that "(f)or those who have never experienced Photoshop, GIMP is simply a very powerful image manipulation program," and "(i)f you're willing to invest some time learning it, it can be a very good graphics tool."[94]
+GIMP's fitness for use in professional environments is regularly reviewed; it is often compared to and suggested as a possible replacement for Adobe Photoshop.[95][96] GIMP has similar functionality to Photoshop, but has a different user interface.[97]
+GIMP 2.6 was used to create nearly all of the art in Lucas the Game, an independent video game by developer Timothy Courtney. Courtney started development of Lucas the Game in early 2014, and the video game was published in July 2015 for PC and Mac. Courtney explains GIMP is a powerful tool, fully capable of large professional projects, such as video games.[98]
+The single-window mode introduced in GIMP 2.8 was reviewed in 2012 by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica, who noted that it made the user experience feel "more streamlined and less cluttered".[99] Michael Burns, writing for Macworld in 2014, described the single-window interface of GIMP 2.8.10 as a "big improvement".[100]
+In his review of GIMP for ExtremeTech in October 2013, David Cardinal noted that GIMP's reputation of being hard to use and lacking features has "changed dramatically over the last couple years", and that it was "no longer a crippled alternative to Photoshop". He described GIMP's scripting as one of its strengths, but also remarked that some of Photoshop's features –  such as Text, 3D commands, Adjustment Layers and History –  are either less powerful or missing in GIMP. Cardinal favorably described the UFRaw converter for raw images used with GIMP, noting that it still "requires some patience to figure out how to use those more advanced capabilities". Cardinal stated that GIMP is "easy enough to try" despite not having as well developed documentation and help system as those for Photoshop, concluding that it "has become a worthy alternative to Photoshop for anyone on a budget who doesn't need all of Photoshop's vast feature set".[101]
+Wilber is the official GIMP mascot. Wilber has relevance outside of GIMP as a racer in SuperTuxKart and was displayed on the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) as part of Project Blinkenlights.[102][103][104]
+Wilber was created at some time before 25 September 1997 by Tuomas Kuosmanen (tigert) and has since received additional accessories and a construction kit to ease the process.[105]
+Tools used to perform image editing can be accessed via the toolbox, through menus and dialogue windows. They include filters and brushes, as well as transformation, selection, layer and masking tools.
+There are several ways of selecting colors, including palettes, color choosers and using an eyedropper tool to select a colour on the canvas. The built-in color choosers include RGB/HSV selector or scales, water-color selector, CMYK selector and a color-wheel selector. Colors can also be selected using hexadecimal color codes as used in HTML color selection. GIMP has native support for indexed colour and RGB color spaces; other color spaces are supported using decomposition where each channel of the new color space becomes a black-and-white image. CMYK, LAB and HSV (hue, saturation, value) are supported this way.[106][107] Color blending can be achieved using the Blend tool, by applying a gradient to the surface of an image and using GIMP's color modes. Gradients are also integrated into tools such as the brush tool, when the user paints this way the output color slowly changes. There are a number of default gradients included with GIMP; a user can also create custom gradients with tools provided. Gradient plug-ins are also available.
+GIMP selection tools include a rectangular and circular selection tool, free select tool, and fuzzy select tool (also known as magic wand). More advanced selection tools include the select by color tool for selecting contiguous regions of color—and the scissors select tool, which creates selections semi-automatically between areas of highly contrasting colors. GIMP also supports a quick mask mode where a user can use a brush to paint the area of a selection.  Visibly this looks like a red colored overlay being added or removed. The foreground select tool is an implementation of Simple Interactive Object Extraction (SIOX) a method used to perform the extraction of foreground elements, such as a person or a tree in focus. The Paths Tool allows a user to create vectors (also known as Bézier curves). Users can use paths to create complex selections, including around natural curves. They can paint (or "stroke") the paths with brushes, patterns, or various line styles. Users can name and save paths for reuse.
+There are many tools that can be used for editing images in GIMP. The more common tools include a paint brush, pencil, airbrush, eraser and ink tools used to create new or blended pixels. The Bucket Fill tool can be used to fill a selection with a color or pattern. The Blend tool can be used to fill a selection with a color gradient. These color transitions can be applied to large regions or smaller custom path selections.
+GIMP also provides "smart" tools that use a more complex algorithm to do things that otherwise would be time-consuming or impossible. These include:
+An image being edited in GIMP can consist of many layers in a stack. The user manual suggests that "A good way to visualize a GIMP image is as a stack of transparencies," where in GIMP terminology, each level (analogous to a transparency) is called a layer.[108] Each layer in an image is made up of several channels. In an RGB image, there are normally 3 or 4 channels, each consisting of a red, green and blue channel. Color sublayers look like slightly different gray images, but when put together they make a complete image. The fourth channel that may be part of a layer is the alpha channel (or layer mask). This channel measures opacity where a whole or part of an image can be completely visible, partially visible or invisible. Each layer has a layer mode that can be set to change the colors in the image.[109]
+Text layers can be created using the text tool, allowing a user to write on an image. Text layers can be transformed in several ways, such as converting them to a path or selection.[110][111]
+GIMP has approximately 150 standard effects and filters, including Drop Shadow, Blur, Motion Blur and Noise.
+GIMP operations can be automated with scripting languages. The Script-Fu is a Scheme-based language implemented using a TinyScheme interpreter built into GIMP.[112] GIMP can also be scripted in Perl,[113][114] Python (Python-Fu),[115][116] or Tcl, using interpreters external to GIMP.[117] New features can be added to GIMP not only by changing program code (GIMP core), but also by creating plug-ins. These are external programs that are executed and controlled by the main GIMP program.[118][119] MathMap is an example of a plug-in written in C.
+There is support for several methods of sharpening and blurring images, including the blur and sharpen tool. The unsharp mask tool is used to sharpen an image selectively — it sharpens only those areas of an image that are sufficiently detailed. The Unsharp Mask tool is considered to give more targeted results for photographs than a normal sharpening filter.[120][121] The Selective Gaussian Blur tool works in a similar way, except it blurs areas of an image with little detail.
+The Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) was first introduced as part of GIMP on the 2.6 release of GIMP. This initial introduction does not yet exploit all of the capabilities of GEGL; as of the 2.6 release, GIMP can use GEGL to perform high bit-depth color operations; because of this less information is lost when performing color operations.[122] When GEGL is fully integrated, GIMP will have a higher color bit depth and better non-destructive work-flow. GIMP 2.8.xx supports only 8-bit of color, which is much less than what e.g. digital cameras produce (12-bit or more). Full support for high bit depth is included with GIMP 2.10. OpenCL enables hardware acceleration for some operations.[123]
+GIMP supports importing and exporting with a large number of different file formats,[124] GIMP's native format XCF is designed to store all information GIMP can contain about an image; XCF is named after the eXperimental Computing Facility where GIMP was authored.  Import and export capability can be extended to additional file formats by means of plug-ins. XCF file size is extended to more than 4 GB since 2.9.6 and new stable tree 2.10.x.
+Because of the free and open-source nature of GIMP, several forks, variants and derivatives of the computer program have been created to fit the needs of their creators. While GIMP is cross-platform, variants of GIMP may not be. These variants are neither hosted nor linked on the GIMP site.  The GIMP site does not host GIMP builds for Windows or Unix-like operating systems either, although it does include a link to a Windows build.
+Variants include:

en/2204.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,131 @@

+See Taxonomy
+The giraffe (Giraffa) is an African artiodactyl mammal, the tallest living terrestrial animal and the largest ruminant.  It is traditionally considered to be one species, Giraffa camelopardalis, with nine subspecies. However, the existence of up to eight extant giraffe species has been described, based upon research into the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, as well as morphological measurements of Giraffa. Seven other species are extinct, prehistoric species known from fossils.
+The giraffe's chief distinguishing characteristics are its extremely long neck and legs, its horn-like ossicones, and its distinctive coat patterns. It is classified under the family Giraffidae, along with its closest extant relative, the okapi. Its scattered range extends from Chad in the north to South Africa in the south, and from Niger in the west to Somalia in the east. Giraffes usually inhabit savannahs and woodlands. Their food source is leaves, fruits and flowers of woody plants, primarily acacia species, which they browse at heights most other herbivores cannot reach. They may be preyed on by lions, leopards, spotted hyenas and African wild dogs. Giraffes live in herds of related females and their offspring, or bachelor herds of unrelated adult males, but are gregarious and may gather in large aggregations. Males establish social hierarchies through "necking", which are combat bouts where the neck is used as a weapon. Dominant males gain mating access to females, which bear the sole responsibility for raising the young.
+The giraffe has intrigued various cultures, both ancient and modern, for its peculiar appearance, and has often been featured in paintings, books, and cartoons. It is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as vulnerable to extinction, and has been extirpated from many parts of its former range. Giraffes are still found in numerous national parks and game reserves but estimates as of 2016 indicate that there are approximately 97,500 members of Giraffa in the wild. More than 1,600 were kept in zoos in 2010.
+The name "giraffe" has its earliest known origins in the Arabic word zarāfah (زرافة),[2] perhaps borrowed from the animal's Somali name geri.[3] The Arab name is translated as "fast-walker".[4] There were several Middle English spellings, such as jarraf, ziraph, and gerfauntz. The Italian form giraffa arose in the 1590s. The modern English form developed around 1600 from the French girafe.[2] "Camelopard" is an archaic English name for the giraffe deriving from the Ancient Greek for camel and leopard, referring to its camel-like shape and its leopard-like colouring.[5][6]
+Living giraffes were originally classified as one species by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. He gave it the binomial name Cervus camelopardalis. Morten Thrane Brünnich classified the genus Giraffa in 1772.[7] The species name camelopardalis is from Latin.[8]
+Tragulidae
+Antilocapridae
+Giraffidae
+Cervidae
+Bovidae
+Moschidae
+The giraffe is one of only two living genera of the family Giraffidae in the order Artiodactyla, the other being the okapi. The family was once much more extensive, with over 10 fossil genera described. Their closest known relatives may have been the extinct deer-like climacocerids. They, together with the family Antilocapridae (whose only extant species is the pronghorn), have been placed in the superfamily Giraffoidea. These animals may have evolved from the extinct family Palaeomerycidae which might also have been the ancestor of deer.[10]
+The elongation of the neck appears to have started early in the giraffe lineage. Comparisons between giraffes and their ancient relatives suggest that vertebrae close to the skull lengthened earlier, followed by lengthening of vertebrae further down.[11] One early giraffid ancestor was Canthumeryx which has been dated variously to have lived 25–20 million years ago (mya), 17–15 mya or 18–14.3 mya and whose deposits have been found in Libya. This animal was medium-sized, slender and antelope-like. Giraffokeryx appeared 15 mya in the Indian subcontinent and resembled an okapi or a small giraffe, and had a longer neck and similar ossicones.[10] Giraffokeryx may have shared a clade with more massively built giraffids like Sivatherium and Bramatherium.[11]
+Giraffids like Palaeotragus, Shansitherium and Samotherium appeared 14 mya and lived throughout Africa and Eurasia. These animals had bare ossicones and small cranial sinuses and were longer with broader skulls.[10][11] Paleotragus resembled the okapi and may have been its ancestor.[10] Others find that the okapi lineage diverged earlier, before Giraffokeryx.[11] Samotherium was a particularly important transitional fossil in the giraffe lineage as its cervical vertebrae was intermediate in length and structure between a modern giraffe and an okapi, and was more vertical than the okapi's.[12] Bohlinia, which first appeared in southeastern Europe and lived 9–7 mya was likely a direct ancestor of the giraffe. Bohlinia closely resembled modern giraffes, having a long neck and legs and similar ossicones and dentition.[10]
+Bohlinia entered China and northern India in response to climate change. From there, the genus Giraffa evolved and, around 7 mya, entered Africa.[13] Further climate changes caused the extinction of the Asian giraffes, while the African giraffes survived and radiated into several new species. Living giraffes appear to have arisen around 1 mya in eastern Africa during the Pleistocene.[10] Some biologists suggest the modern giraffes descended from G. jumae;[14] others find G. gracilis a more likely candidate.[10] G. jumae was larger and more heavily built while G. gracilis was smaller and more lightly built. The main driver for the evolution of the giraffes is believed to have been the changes from extensive forests to more open habitats, which began 8 mya.[10] During this time, tropical plants disappeared and were replaced by arid C4 plants, and a dry savannah emerged across eastern and northern Africa and western India.[15][16] Some researchers have hypothesised that this new habitat coupled with a different diet, including acacia species, may have exposed giraffe ancestors to toxins that caused higher mutation rates and a higher rate of evolution.[17] The coat patterns of modern giraffes may also have coincided with these habitat changes. Asian giraffes are hypothesised to have had more okapi-like colourations.[10]
+The giraffe genome is around 2.9 billion base pairs in length compared to the 3.3 billion base pairs of the okapi. Of the proteins in giraffe and okapi genes, 19.4% are identical. The two species are equally distantly related to cattle, suggesting the giraffe's unique characteristics are not because of faster evolution. The divergence of giraffe and okapi lineages dates to around 11.5 mya. A small group of regulatory genes in the giraffe appear to be responsible for the animal's stature and associated circulatory adaptations.[18]
+The IUCN currently recognises only one species of giraffe with nine subspecies.[20][21] In 2001, a two-species taxonomy was proposed.[22] A 2007 study on the genetics of giraffes, suggested they were six species: the West African, Rothschild's, reticulated, Masai, Angolan, and South African giraffe. The study deduced from genetic differences in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that giraffes from these populations are reproductively isolated and rarely interbreed, though no natural obstacles block their mutual access. This includes adjacent populations of Rothschild's, reticulated, and Masai giraffes. The Masai giraffe was also suggested to consist of possibly two species separated by the Rift Valley. Reticulated and Masai giraffes were found to have the highest mtDNA diversity, which is consistent with giraffes originating in eastern Africa. Populations further north are more closely related to the former, while those to the south are more related to the latter. Giraffes appear to select mates of the same coat type, which are imprinted on them as calves.[19]
+A 2011 study using detailed analyses of the morphology of giraffes, and application of the phylogenetic species concept, described eight species of living giraffes.[23] A 2016 study also concluded that living giraffes consist of multiple species.[24] The researchers suggested the existence of four species, which have not exchanged genetic information between each other for 1 to 2 million years. Since then, a response to this publication has been published, highlighting seven problems in data interpretation, and concludes "the conclusions should not be accepted unconditionally".[25]
+A 2020 study showed that depending on the method chosen, different taxonomic hypotheses recognizing from two to six species, can be considered for the genus Giraffa. That study also found that multi species coalescent methods can lead to taxonomic over-splitting, as those methods delimit geographic structure rather than species. The 3-species hypothesis, which recognises G. camelopardalis, G. giraffa, and G. tippelskirchi, is highly supported by phylogenetic analyses and also corroborated by most population genetic and multi species coalescent analyses.[26]
+There are also seven extinct species of giraffe, listed as the following:
+G. attica, also extinct, was formerly considered part of Giraffa but was reclassified as Bohlinia attica in 1929.
+The Rothschild's giraffe (G. c. rothschildi) may be an ecotype of G. camelopardalis. Its range includes parts of Uganda and Kenya.[21] Its presence in South Sudan is uncertain.[34] This giraffe has large dark patches that usually have complete margins, but may also have sharp edges. The dark spots may also have paler radiating lines or streaks within them. Spotting does not often reach below the hocks and almost never to the hooves. This ecotype may also develop five "horns".[29]:53 Around 1,500 individuals believed to remain in the wild,[21] and more than 450 are kept in zoos.[30] According to genetic analysis circa September 2016, it is conspecific with the Nubian giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis).[24]
+Fully grown giraffes stand 4.3–5.7 m (14.1–18.7 ft) tall, with males taller than females.[44][45][46] The tallest recorded male was 5.88 m (19.3 ft) and the tallest recorded female was 5.17 m (17.0 ft) tall.[44][47] The average weight is 1,192 kg (2,628 lb) for an adult male and 828 kg (1,825 lb) for an adult female[48] with maximum weights of 1,930 kg (4,250 lb) and 1,180 kg (2,600 lb) having been recorded for males and females, respectively.[45][46] Despite its long neck and legs, the giraffe's body is relatively short.[49]:66 Located at both sides of the head, the giraffe's large, bulging eyes give it good all-round vision from its great height.[50]:25 Giraffes see in colour[50]:26 and their senses of hearing and smell are also sharp.[51] The animal can close its muscular nostrils to protect against sandstorms and ants.[50]:27
+The giraffe's prehensile tongue is about 45 cm (18 in) long.[45][46] It is purplish-black in colour, perhaps to protect against sunburn, and is useful for grasping foliage, as well as for grooming and cleaning the animal's nose.[50]:27 The upper lip of the giraffe is also prehensile and useful when foraging, and is covered in hair to protect against thorns. The tongue and inside of the mouth are covered in papillae.[7]
+The coat has dark blotches or patches (which can be orange, chestnut, brown, or nearly black in colour[51]) separated by light hair (usually white or cream in colour.[51]) Male giraffes become darker as they age.[42] The coat pattern has been claimed to serve as camouflage in the light and shade patterns of savannah woodlands.[43] When standing among trees and bushes, they are hard to see at even a few metres distance. However, adult giraffes move about to gain the best view of an approaching predator, relying on their size and ability to defend themselves rather than on camouflage, which may be more important for calves.[10] Giraffe calves inherit some spot pattern traits from their mothers, and variation in some spot traits are correlated with neonatal survival.[52] The skin underneath the dark areas may serve as windows for thermoregulation, being sites for complex blood vessel systems and large sweat glands.[53] Each individual giraffe has a unique coat pattern.[42]
+The skin of a giraffe is mostly gray,[48] or tan.[54] Its thickness allows the animal to run through thorn bushes without being punctured.[50]:34 The fur may serve as a chemical defence, as its parasite repellents give the animal a characteristic scent. At least 11 main aromatic chemicals are in the fur, although indole and 3-methylindole are responsible for most of the smell. Because the males have a stronger odour than the females, the odour may also have sexual function.[55] Along the animal's neck is a mane made of short, erect hairs.[7] The one-metre (3.3-ft) tail ends in a long, dark tuft of hair and is used as a defense against insects.[50]:36
+Both sexes have prominent horn-like structures called ossicones, which are formed from ossified cartilage, covered in skin and fused to the skull at the parietal bones.[42] Being vascularized, the ossicones may have a role in thermoregulation,[53] and are also used in combat between males.[56] Appearance is a reliable guide to the sex or age of a giraffe: the ossicones of females and young are thin and display tufts of hair on top, whereas those of adult males end in knobs and tend to be bald on top.[42] Also, a median lump, which is more prominent in males, emerges at the front of the skull.[7] Males develop calcium deposits that form bumps on their skulls as they age.[51] A giraffe's skull is lightened by multiple sinuses.[49]:70 However, as males age, their skulls become heavier and more club-like, helping them become more dominant in combat.[42] The upper jaw has a grooved palate and lacks front teeth.[50]:26 The giraffe's molars have a rough surface.[50]:27
+The front and back legs of a giraffe are about the same length. The radius and ulna of the front legs are articulated by the carpus, which, while structurally equivalent to the human wrist, functions as a knee.[57] It appears that a suspensory ligament allows the lanky legs to support the animal's great weight.[58] The foot of the giraffe reaches a diameter of 30 cm (12 in), and the hoof is 15 cm (5.9 in) high in males and 10 cm (3.9 in) in females.[50]:36 The rear of each hoof is low and the fetlock is close to the ground, allowing the foot to provide additional support to the animal's weight.[7] Giraffes lack dewclaws and interdigital glands. The giraffe's pelvis, though relatively short, has an ilium that is outspread at the upper ends.[7]
+A giraffe has only two gaits: walking and galloping. Walking is done by moving the legs on one side of the body at the same time, then doing the same on the other side.[42] When galloping, the hind legs move around the front legs before the latter move forward,[51] and the tail will curl up.[42] The animal relies on the forward and backward motions of its head and neck to maintain balance and the counter momentum while galloping.[37]:327��29 The giraffe can reach a sprint speed of up to 60 km/h (37 mph),[59] and can sustain 50 km/h (31 mph) for several kilometres.[60]
+A giraffe rests by lying with its body on top of its folded legs.[37]:329 To lie down, the animal kneels on its front legs and then lowers the rest of its body. To get back up, it first gets on its knees and spreads its hind legs to raise its hindquarters. It then straightens its front legs. With each step, the animal swings its head.[50]:31 In captivity, the giraffe sleeps intermittently around 4.6 hours per day, mostly at night.[61] It usually sleeps lying down; however, standing sleeps have been recorded, particularly in older individuals. Intermittent short "deep sleep" phases while lying are characterised by the giraffe bending its neck backwards and resting its head on the hip or thigh, a position believed to indicate paradoxical sleep.[61] If the giraffe wants to bend down to drink, it either spreads its front legs or bends its knees.[42] Giraffes would probably not be competent swimmers as their long legs would be highly cumbersome in the water,[62] although they could possibly float.[63] When swimming, the thorax would be weighed down by the front legs, making it difficult for the animal to move its neck and legs in harmony[62][63] or keep its head above the surface.[62]
+The giraffe has an extremely elongated neck, which can be up to 2–2.4 m (6.6–7.9 ft) in length, accounting for much of the animal's vertical height.[45][46][50]:29[64] The long neck results from a disproportionate lengthening of the cervical vertebrae, not from the addition of more vertebrae. Each cervical vertebra is over 28 cm (11 in) long.[49]:71 They comprise 52–54 per cent of the length of the giraffe's vertebral column, compared with the 27–33 percent typical of similar large ungulates, including the giraffe's closest living relative, the okapi.[17] This elongation largely takes place after birth, perhaps because giraffe mothers would have a difficult time giving birth to young with the same neck proportions as adults.[65] The giraffe's head and neck are held up by large muscles and a strengthened nuchal ligament, which are anchored by long dorsal spines on the anterior thoracic vertebrae, giving the animal a hump.[7][66]
+The giraffe's neck vertebrae have ball and socket joints.[49]:71 In particular, the atlas–axis joint (C1 and C2) allows the animal to tilt its head vertically and reach more branches with the tongue.[50]:29 The point of articulation between the cervical and thoracic vertebrae of giraffes is shifted to lie between the first and second thoracic vertebrae (T1 and T2), unlike most other ruminants where the articulation is between the seventh cervical vertebra (C7) and T1.[17][65] This allows C7 to contribute directly to increased neck length and has given rise to the suggestion that T1 is actually C8, and that giraffes have added an extra cervical vertebra.[66] However, this proposition is not generally accepted, as T1 has other morphological features, such as an articulating rib, deemed diagnostic of thoracic vertebrae, and because exceptions to the mammalian limit of seven cervical vertebrae are generally characterised by increased neurological anomalies and maladies.[17]
+There are several hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origin and maintenance of elongation in giraffe necks.[56] The "competing browsers hypothesis" was originally suggested by Charles Darwin and challenged only recently. It suggests that competitive pressure from smaller browsers, such as kudu, steenbok and impala, encouraged the elongation of the neck, as it enabled giraffes to reach food that competitors could not. This advantage is real, as giraffes can and do feed up to 4.5 m (15 ft) high, while even quite large competitors, such as kudu, can feed up to only about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) high.[67] There is also research suggesting that browsing competition is intense at lower levels, and giraffes feed more efficiently (gaining more leaf biomass with each mouthful) high in the canopy.[68][69] However, scientists disagree about just how much time giraffes spend feeding at levels beyond the reach of other browsers,[14][56][67][70]
+and a 2010 study found that adult giraffes with longer necks actually suffered higher mortality rates under drought conditions than their shorter-necked counterparts. This study suggests that maintaining a longer neck requires more nutrients, which puts longer-necked giraffes at risk during a food shortage.[71]
+Another theory, the sexual selection hypothesis, proposes that the long necks evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic, giving males an advantage in "necking" contests (see below) to establish dominance and obtain access to sexually receptive females.[14] In support of this theory, necks are longer and heavier for males than females of the same age,[14][56] and the former do not employ other forms of combat.[14] However, one objection is that it fails to explain why female giraffes also have long necks.[72] It has also been proposed that the neck serves to give the animal greater vigilance.[73][74]
+In mammals, the left recurrent laryngeal nerve is longer than the right; in the giraffe it is over 30 cm (12 in) longer. These nerves are longer in the giraffe than in any other living animal;[75] the left nerve is over 2 m (6 ft 7 in) long.[76] Each nerve cell in this path begins in the brainstem and passes down the neck along the vagus nerve, then branches off into the recurrent laryngeal nerve which passes back up the neck to the larynx. Thus, these nerve cells have a length of nearly 5 m (16 ft) in the largest giraffes.[75] The structure of a giraffe's brain resembles that of domestic cattle.[50]:31 It is kept cool by evaporative heat loss in the nasal passages.[53] The shape of the skeleton gives the giraffe a small lung volume relative to its mass. Its long neck gives it a large amount of dead space, in spite of its narrow windpipe. These factors increase the resistance to airflow. Nevertheless, the animal can still supply enough oxygen to its tissues and it can increase its respiratory rate and oxygen diffusion when running.[77]
+The circulatory system of the giraffe has several adaptations for its great height. Its heart, which can weigh more than 11 kg (25 lb) and measures about 60 cm (2 ft) long, must generate approximately double the blood pressure required for a human to maintain blood flow to the brain. As such, the wall of the heart can be as thick as 7.5 cm (3.0 in).[51] Giraffes have unusually high heart rates for their size, at 150 beats per minute.[49]:76 When the animal lowers its head the blood rushes down fairly unopposed and a rete mirabile in the upper neck, with its large cross sectional area, prevents excess blood flow to the brain. When it raises again, the blood vessels constrict and direct blood into the brain so the animal does not faint.[78] The jugular veins contain several (most commonly seven) valves to prevent blood flowing back into the head from the inferior vena cava and right atrium while the head is lowered.[79] Conversely, the blood vessels in the lower legs are under great pressure because of the weight of fluid pressing down on them. To solve this problem, the skin of the lower legs is thick and tight; preventing too much blood from pouring into them.[43]
+Giraffes have oesophageal muscles that are unusually strong to allow regurgitation of food from the stomach up the neck and into the mouth for rumination.[49]:78 They have four chambered stomachs, as in all ruminants, and the first chamber has adapted to their specialised diet.[7] The intestines of an adult giraffe measure more than 70 m (230 ft) in length and have a relatively small ratio of small to large intestine.[80] The liver of the giraffe is small and compact.[49]:76 A gallbladder is generally present during fetal life, but it may disappear before birth.[7][81][82]
+Giraffes usually inhabit savannahs and open woodlands. They prefer Acacieae, Commiphora, Combretum and open Terminalia woodlands over denser environments like Brachystegia woodlands.[37]:322 The Angolan giraffe can be found in desert environments.[83] Giraffes browse on the twigs of trees, preferring trees of the subfamily Acacieae and the genera Commiphora and Terminalia,[4] which are important sources of calcium and protein to sustain the giraffe's growth rate.[10] They also feed on shrubs, grass and fruit.[37]:324 A giraffe eats around 34 kg (75 lb) of foliage daily.[42] When stressed, giraffes may chew the bark off branches. Although herbivorous, the giraffe has been known to visit carcasses and lick dried meat off bones.[37]:325
+During the wet season, food is abundant and giraffes are more spread out, while during the dry season, they gather around the remaining evergreen trees and bushes.[4] Mothers tend to feed in open areas, presumably to make it easier to detect predators, although this may reduce their feeding efficiency.[70] As a ruminant, the giraffe first chews its food, then swallows it for processing and then visibly passes the half-digested cud up the neck and back into the mouth to chew again.[49]:78–79 It is common for a giraffe to salivate while feeding.[50]:27 The giraffe requires less food than many other herbivores because the foliage it eats has more concentrated nutrients and it has a more efficient digestive system.[4] The animal's faeces come in the form of small pellets.[7] When it has access to water, a giraffe drinks at intervals no longer than three days.[42]
+Giraffes have a great effect on the trees that they feed on, delaying the growth of young trees for some years and giving "waistlines" to trees that are too tall. Feeding is at its highest during the first and last hours of daytime. Between these hours, giraffes mostly stand and ruminate. Rumination is the dominant activity during the night, when it is mostly done lying down.[42]
+Giraffes are usually found in groups that vary in size and composition according to ecological, anthropogenic, temporal, and social factors.[84] Traditionally, the composition of these groups had been described as open and ever-changing.[85] For research purposes, a "group" has been defined as "a collection of individuals that are less than a kilometre apart and moving in the same general direction."[86] More recent studies have found that giraffes have long-term social associations and may form groups or pairs based on kinship, sex or other factors. These groups may regularly associate with one another in larger communities or sub-communities within a fission–fusion society.[87][88][89] The number of giraffes in a group can range up to 66 individuals.[89][84]
+Giraffe groups tend to be sex-segregated[89] although mixed-sex groups made of adult females and young males are known to occur. Particularly stable giraffe groups are those made of mothers and their young,[86] which can last weeks or months.[90] Social cohesion in these groups is maintained by the bonds formed between calves.[37]:330[86] Female association appears to be based on space-use and individuals may be matrilineally related.[89] In general, females are more selective than males in who they associate with in regards to individuals of the same sex.[88] Young males also form groups and will engage in playfights. However, as they get older males become more solitary but may also associate in pairs or with female groups.[89][90] Giraffes are not territorial,[7] but they have home ranges that vary according to rainfall and proximity to human settlements.[91] Male giraffes occasionally wander far from areas that they normally frequent.[37]:329
+Although generally quiet and non-vocal, giraffes have been heard to communicate using various sounds. During courtship, males emit loud coughs.[42] Females call their young by bellowing. Calves will emit snorts, bleats, mooing and mewing sounds. Giraffes also snore, hiss, moan, grunt and make flute-like sounds.[42][92] During nighttime, giraffes appear to hum to each other above the infrasound range for purposes which are unclear.[92]
+Reproduction in giraffes is broadly polygamous: a few older males mate with the fertile females. Male giraffes assess female fertility by tasting the female's urine to detect oestrus, in a multi-step process known as the flehmen response.[86][90] Males prefer young adult females over juveniles and older adults.[86] Once an oestrous female is detected, the male will attempt to court her. When courting, dominant males will keep subordinate ones at bay.[90] A courting male may lick a female's tail, rest his head and neck on her body or nudge her with his horns. During copulation, the male stands on his hind legs with his head held up and his front legs resting on the female's sides.[42]
+Giraffe gestation lasts 400–460 days, after which a single calf is normally born, although twins occur on rare occasions.[93] The mother gives birth standing up. The calf emerges head and front legs first, having broken through the fetal membranes, and falls to the ground, severing the umbilical cord.[7] The mother then grooms the newborn and helps it stand up.[50]:40 A newborn giraffe is 1.7–2 m (5.6–6.6 ft) tall.[44][45][46] Within a few hours of birth, the calf can run around and is almost indistinguishable from a one-week-old. However, for the first 1–3 weeks, it spends most of its time hiding;[94] its coat pattern providing camouflage. The ossicones, which have lain flat while it was in the womb, become erect within a few days.[42]
+Mothers with calves will gather in nursery herds, moving or browsing together. Mothers in such a group may sometimes leave their calves with one female while they forage and drink elsewhere. This is known as a "calving pool".[94] Adult males play almost no role in raising the young,[37]:337 although they appear to have friendly interactions.[86] Calves are at risk of predation, and a mother giraffe will stand over her calf and kick at an approaching predator.[42] Females watching calving pools will only alert their own young if they detect a disturbance, although the others will take notice and follow.[94]
+The length time in which offspring stay with their mother varies, though it can last until the female's next calving.[94] Likewise, calves may suckle for only a month[37]:335 or as long as a year.[42][90] Females become sexually mature when they are four years old, while males become mature at four or five years. Spermatogenesis in male giraffes begins at three to four years of age.[95] Males must wait until they are at least seven years old to gain the opportunity to mate.[42][50]:40
+Male giraffes use their necks as weapons in combat, a behaviour known as "necking". Necking is used to establish dominance and males that win necking bouts have greater reproductive success.[14] This behaviour occurs at low or high intensity. In low intensity necking, the combatants rub and lean against each other. The male that can hold itself more erect wins the bout. In high intensity necking, the combatants will spread their front legs and swing their necks at each other, attempting to land blows with their ossicones. The contestants will try to dodge each other's blows and then get ready to counter. The power of a blow depends on the weight of the skull and the arc of the swing.[42] A necking duel can last more than half an hour, depending on how well matched the combatants are.[37]:331 Although most fights do not lead to serious injury, there have been records of broken jaws, broken necks, and even deaths.[14]
+After a duel, it is common for two male giraffes to caress and court each other. Such interactions between males have been found to be more frequent than heterosexual coupling.[96] In one study, up to 94 percent of observed mounting incidents took place between males. The proportion of same-sex activities varied from 30–75 percent. Only one percent of same-sex mounting incidents occurred between females.[97]
+Giraffes have high adult survival probability,[98][99] and an unusually long lifespan compared to other ruminants, up to 38 years.[100] Because of their size, eyesight and powerful kicks, adult giraffes are usually not subject to predation,[42] although lions may regularly prey on individuals up to 550 kg (1,210 lb).[101] Giraffes are the most common food source for the big cats in Kruger National Park, comprising nearly a third of the meat consumed, although only a small portion of the giraffes were probably killed by predators, as a majority of the consumed giraffes appeared to be scavenged.[102][103] Nile crocodiles can also be a threat to giraffes when they bend down to drink.[50] Calves are much more vulnerable than adults and are additionally preyed on by leopards, spotted hyenas and wild dogs.[51] A quarter to a half of giraffe calves reach adulthood.[98][104] Calf survival varies according to the season of birth, with calves born during the dry season having higher survival rates.[105]
+The local, seasonal presence of large herds of migratory wildebeests and zebras reduces predation pressure on giraffe calves and increases their survival probability.[106] In turn, it has been suggested that other ungulates may benefit from associating with giraffes as their height allows them to spot predators from further away. Zebras were found to glean information on predation risk from giraffe body language and spend less time scanning the environment when giraffes are present.[107]
+Some parasites feed on giraffes. They are often hosts for ticks, especially in the area around the genitals, which has thinner skin than other areas. Tick species that commonly feed on giraffes are those of genera Hyalomma, Amblyomma and Rhipicephalus. Giraffes may rely on red-billed and yellow-billed oxpeckers to clean them of ticks and alert them to danger. Giraffes host numerous species of internal parasite and are susceptible to various diseases. They were victims of the (now eradicated) viral illness rinderpest.[7] Giraffes can also suffer from a skin disorder, which comes in the form of wrinkles, lesions or raw fissures. In Tanzania, it appears to be caused by a nematode, and may be further affected by secondary infections. As much as 79% of giraffes show signs of the disease in Ruaha National Park, but it did not cause mortality in Tarangire and is less prevalent in areas with fertile soils.[108][109][110]
+Humans have interacted with giraffes for millennia. They were depicted in art throughout the African continent, including that of the Kiffians, Egyptians, and Kushites.[50]:45–47 The Kiffians were responsible for a life-size rock engraving of two giraffes, dated 8,000 years ago, that has been called the "world's largest rock art petroglyph".[50]:45[111] The San people of southern Africa have medicine dances named after some animals; the giraffe dance is performed to treat head ailments.[112]  How the giraffe got its height has been the subject of various African folktales,[14] including one from eastern Africa which explains that the giraffe grew tall from eating too many magic herbs.[113] According to a tale in Tanzania, the giraffe was given both its height and silence when it asked the creator for the gift of wisdom. It could now see and hear all but it not speak as "silence is wisdom".[114] The Dinka people of the Sudan have traditionally considered the giraffe to be their clan animal and the earthly representative of their deity.[115] The Tugen people of modern Kenya used the giraffe to depict their god Mda.[116]
+The Egyptians gave the giraffe its own hieroglyph, named 'sr' in Old Egyptian and 'mmy' in later periods.[50]:49 They also kept giraffes as pets and shipped them around the Mediterranean.[50]:48–49 The giraffe was also known to the Greeks and Romans, who believed that it was an unnatural hybrid of a camel and a leopard or a panther and called it camelopardalis.[50]:50 The giraffe was among the many animals collected and displayed by the Romans. The first one in Rome was brought in by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and exhibited to the public.[50]:52 With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the housing of giraffes in Europe declined.[50]:54 During the Middle Ages, giraffes were known to Europeans through contact with the Arabs, who revered the giraffe for its peculiar appearance.[51]
+Individual captive giraffes were given celebrity status throughout history. In 1414, a giraffe was shipped from Malindi to Bengal. It was then taken to China by explorer Zheng He and placed in a Ming dynasty zoo. The animal was a source of fascination for the Chinese people, who associated it with the mythical Qilin.[50]:56 The Medici giraffe was a giraffe presented to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1486. It caused a great stir on its arrival in Florence.[117] Zarafa, another famous giraffe, was brought from Egypt to Paris in the early 19th century as a gift from Muhammad Ali of Egypt to Charles X of France. A sensation, the giraffe was the subject of numerous memorabilia or "giraffanalia".[50]:81
+Giraffes continue to have a presence in modern culture. Salvador Dalí depicted them with burning manes in some of his surrealist paintings. Dali considered the giraffe to be a symbol of masculinity, and a flaming giraffe was meant to be a "masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster".[50]:123 Several children's books feature the giraffe, including David A. Ufer's The Giraffe Who Was Afraid of Heights, Giles Andreae's Giraffes Can't Dance and Roald Dahl's The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me. Giraffes have appeared in animated films, as minor characters in Disney's The Lion King and Dumbo, and in more prominent roles in The Wild and in the Madagascar films. Sophie the Giraffe has been a popular teether since 1961. Another famous fictional giraffe is the Toys "R" Us mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe.[50]:127 Giraffes are used to represent innocence in The Last of Us video game series.[118]
+The giraffe has also been used for some scientific experiments and discoveries. Scientists have looked at the properties of giraffe skin when developing suits for astronauts and fighter pilots[49]:76 because the people in these professions are in danger of passing out if blood rushes to their legs. Computer scientists have modeled the coat patterns of several subspecies using reaction–diffusion mechanisms.[119]
+The constellation of Camelopardalis, introduced in the seventeenth century, depicts a giraffe.[50]:119–20 The Tswana people of Botswana traditionally see the constellation Crux as two giraffes – Acrux and Mimosa forming a male, and Gacrux and Delta Crucis forming the female.[120]
+In 2010, giraffes were assessed as Least Concern from a conservation perspective by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but the 2016 assessment categorized giraffes as Vulnerable.[1] Giraffes have been extirpated from much of their historic range including Eritrea, Guinea, Mauritania and Senegal. They may also have disappeared from Angola, Mali, and Nigeria, but have been introduced to Rwanda and Swaziland.[1] The Masai and reticulated subspecies are endangered,[121][122] and the Rothschild subspecies is near threatened.[34] The Nubian subspecies is critically endangered.[123] In 1997, Jonathan Kingdon suggested that the Nubian giraffe was the most threatened of all giraffes;[4] as of 2018[update], it may number about 450 individuals.[123] Private game reserves have contributed to the preservation of giraffe populations in southern Africa.[43]
+Giraffes were probably common targets for hunters throughout Africa.[37] Different parts of their bodies were used for different purposes.[7] Their meat was used for food. The tail hairs served as flyswatters, bracelets, necklaces, and thread.[7][37] Shields, sandals, and drums were made using the skin, and the strings of musical instruments were from the tendons.[7] The smoke from burning giraffe skins was used by the medicine men of Buganda to treat nose bleeds.[37] The Humr people of Kordofan consume the drink Umm Nyolokh, which is prepared from the liver and bone marrow of giraffes. Richard Rudgley hypothesised that Umm Nyolokh might contain DMT.[124] The drink is said to cause hallucinations of giraffes, believed to be the giraffes' ghosts, by the Humr.[125] In the 19th century, European explorers began to hunt them for sport.[50] Habitat destruction has hurt the giraffe, too: in the Sahel, the need for firewood and grazing room for livestock has led to deforestation. Normally, giraffes can coexist with livestock, since they do not directly compete with them.[43] In 2017, severe droughts in northern Kenya have led to increased tensions over land and the killing of wildlife by herders, with giraffe populations being particularly hit.[126]
+Giraffe Manor is a popular hotel in Nairobi that also serves as sanctuary for Rothschild's giraffes.[127] The giraffe is a protected species in most of its range. It is the national animal of Tanzania,[128] and is protected by law.[129] Unauthorised killing can result in imprisonment.[130] The UN backed Convention of Migratory Species selected giraffes for protection in 2017.[131] In 1999, it was estimated that over 140,000 giraffes existed in the wild,[31] but estimations as of 2016 indicate that there are approximately 97,500 members of Giraffa in the wild, down from 155,000 in 1985.[132][133] As of 2010[update], there were more than 1,600 in captivity at Species360-registered zoos (not including non-Species360 zoos or any kept by private people).[30]
+Aerial survey is the most common method of monitoring giraffe population trends in the vast roadless tracts of African landscapes, but aerial methods are known to undercount giraffes. Ground-based survey methods are more accurate and should be used in conjunction with aerial surveys to make accurate estimates of population sizes and trends.[134]

en/2205.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,131 @@

+See Taxonomy
+The giraffe (Giraffa) is an African artiodactyl mammal, the tallest living terrestrial animal and the largest ruminant.  It is traditionally considered to be one species, Giraffa camelopardalis, with nine subspecies. However, the existence of up to eight extant giraffe species has been described, based upon research into the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, as well as morphological measurements of Giraffa. Seven other species are extinct, prehistoric species known from fossils.
+The giraffe's chief distinguishing characteristics are its extremely long neck and legs, its horn-like ossicones, and its distinctive coat patterns. It is classified under the family Giraffidae, along with its closest extant relative, the okapi. Its scattered range extends from Chad in the north to South Africa in the south, and from Niger in the west to Somalia in the east. Giraffes usually inhabit savannahs and woodlands. Their food source is leaves, fruits and flowers of woody plants, primarily acacia species, which they browse at heights most other herbivores cannot reach. They may be preyed on by lions, leopards, spotted hyenas and African wild dogs. Giraffes live in herds of related females and their offspring, or bachelor herds of unrelated adult males, but are gregarious and may gather in large aggregations. Males establish social hierarchies through "necking", which are combat bouts where the neck is used as a weapon. Dominant males gain mating access to females, which bear the sole responsibility for raising the young.
+The giraffe has intrigued various cultures, both ancient and modern, for its peculiar appearance, and has often been featured in paintings, books, and cartoons. It is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as vulnerable to extinction, and has been extirpated from many parts of its former range. Giraffes are still found in numerous national parks and game reserves but estimates as of 2016 indicate that there are approximately 97,500 members of Giraffa in the wild. More than 1,600 were kept in zoos in 2010.
+The name "giraffe" has its earliest known origins in the Arabic word zarāfah (زرافة),[2] perhaps borrowed from the animal's Somali name geri.[3] The Arab name is translated as "fast-walker".[4] There were several Middle English spellings, such as jarraf, ziraph, and gerfauntz. The Italian form giraffa arose in the 1590s. The modern English form developed around 1600 from the French girafe.[2] "Camelopard" is an archaic English name for the giraffe deriving from the Ancient Greek for camel and leopard, referring to its camel-like shape and its leopard-like colouring.[5][6]
+Living giraffes were originally classified as one species by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. He gave it the binomial name Cervus camelopardalis. Morten Thrane Brünnich classified the genus Giraffa in 1772.[7] The species name camelopardalis is from Latin.[8]
+Tragulidae
+Antilocapridae
+Giraffidae
+Cervidae
+Bovidae
+Moschidae
+The giraffe is one of only two living genera of the family Giraffidae in the order Artiodactyla, the other being the okapi. The family was once much more extensive, with over 10 fossil genera described. Their closest known relatives may have been the extinct deer-like climacocerids. They, together with the family Antilocapridae (whose only extant species is the pronghorn), have been placed in the superfamily Giraffoidea. These animals may have evolved from the extinct family Palaeomerycidae which might also have been the ancestor of deer.[10]
+The elongation of the neck appears to have started early in the giraffe lineage. Comparisons between giraffes and their ancient relatives suggest that vertebrae close to the skull lengthened earlier, followed by lengthening of vertebrae further down.[11] One early giraffid ancestor was Canthumeryx which has been dated variously to have lived 25–20 million years ago (mya), 17–15 mya or 18–14.3 mya and whose deposits have been found in Libya. This animal was medium-sized, slender and antelope-like. Giraffokeryx appeared 15 mya in the Indian subcontinent and resembled an okapi or a small giraffe, and had a longer neck and similar ossicones.[10] Giraffokeryx may have shared a clade with more massively built giraffids like Sivatherium and Bramatherium.[11]
+Giraffids like Palaeotragus, Shansitherium and Samotherium appeared 14 mya and lived throughout Africa and Eurasia. These animals had bare ossicones and small cranial sinuses and were longer with broader skulls.[10][11] Paleotragus resembled the okapi and may have been its ancestor.[10] Others find that the okapi lineage diverged earlier, before Giraffokeryx.[11] Samotherium was a particularly important transitional fossil in the giraffe lineage as its cervical vertebrae was intermediate in length and structure between a modern giraffe and an okapi, and was more vertical than the okapi's.[12] Bohlinia, which first appeared in southeastern Europe and lived 9–7 mya was likely a direct ancestor of the giraffe. Bohlinia closely resembled modern giraffes, having a long neck and legs and similar ossicones and dentition.[10]
+Bohlinia entered China and northern India in response to climate change. From there, the genus Giraffa evolved and, around 7 mya, entered Africa.[13] Further climate changes caused the extinction of the Asian giraffes, while the African giraffes survived and radiated into several new species. Living giraffes appear to have arisen around 1 mya in eastern Africa during the Pleistocene.[10] Some biologists suggest the modern giraffes descended from G. jumae;[14] others find G. gracilis a more likely candidate.[10] G. jumae was larger and more heavily built while G. gracilis was smaller and more lightly built. The main driver for the evolution of the giraffes is believed to have been the changes from extensive forests to more open habitats, which began 8 mya.[10] During this time, tropical plants disappeared and were replaced by arid C4 plants, and a dry savannah emerged across eastern and northern Africa and western India.[15][16] Some researchers have hypothesised that this new habitat coupled with a different diet, including acacia species, may have exposed giraffe ancestors to toxins that caused higher mutation rates and a higher rate of evolution.[17] The coat patterns of modern giraffes may also have coincided with these habitat changes. Asian giraffes are hypothesised to have had more okapi-like colourations.[10]
+The giraffe genome is around 2.9 billion base pairs in length compared to the 3.3 billion base pairs of the okapi. Of the proteins in giraffe and okapi genes, 19.4% are identical. The two species are equally distantly related to cattle, suggesting the giraffe's unique characteristics are not because of faster evolution. The divergence of giraffe and okapi lineages dates to around 11.5 mya. A small group of regulatory genes in the giraffe appear to be responsible for the animal's stature and associated circulatory adaptations.[18]
+The IUCN currently recognises only one species of giraffe with nine subspecies.[20][21] In 2001, a two-species taxonomy was proposed.[22] A 2007 study on the genetics of giraffes, suggested they were six species: the West African, Rothschild's, reticulated, Masai, Angolan, and South African giraffe. The study deduced from genetic differences in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that giraffes from these populations are reproductively isolated and rarely interbreed, though no natural obstacles block their mutual access. This includes adjacent populations of Rothschild's, reticulated, and Masai giraffes. The Masai giraffe was also suggested to consist of possibly two species separated by the Rift Valley. Reticulated and Masai giraffes were found to have the highest mtDNA diversity, which is consistent with giraffes originating in eastern Africa. Populations further north are more closely related to the former, while those to the south are more related to the latter. Giraffes appear to select mates of the same coat type, which are imprinted on them as calves.[19]
+A 2011 study using detailed analyses of the morphology of giraffes, and application of the phylogenetic species concept, described eight species of living giraffes.[23] A 2016 study also concluded that living giraffes consist of multiple species.[24] The researchers suggested the existence of four species, which have not exchanged genetic information between each other for 1 to 2 million years. Since then, a response to this publication has been published, highlighting seven problems in data interpretation, and concludes "the conclusions should not be accepted unconditionally".[25]
+A 2020 study showed that depending on the method chosen, different taxonomic hypotheses recognizing from two to six species, can be considered for the genus Giraffa. That study also found that multi species coalescent methods can lead to taxonomic over-splitting, as those methods delimit geographic structure rather than species. The 3-species hypothesis, which recognises G. camelopardalis, G. giraffa, and G. tippelskirchi, is highly supported by phylogenetic analyses and also corroborated by most population genetic and multi species coalescent analyses.[26]
+There are also seven extinct species of giraffe, listed as the following:
+G. attica, also extinct, was formerly considered part of Giraffa but was reclassified as Bohlinia attica in 1929.
+The Rothschild's giraffe (G. c. rothschildi) may be an ecotype of G. camelopardalis. Its range includes parts of Uganda and Kenya.[21] Its presence in South Sudan is uncertain.[34] This giraffe has large dark patches that usually have complete margins, but may also have sharp edges. The dark spots may also have paler radiating lines or streaks within them. Spotting does not often reach below the hocks and almost never to the hooves. This ecotype may also develop five "horns".[29]:53 Around 1,500 individuals believed to remain in the wild,[21] and more than 450 are kept in zoos.[30] According to genetic analysis circa September 2016, it is conspecific with the Nubian giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis).[24]
+Fully grown giraffes stand 4.3–5.7 m (14.1–18.7 ft) tall, with males taller than females.[44][45][46] The tallest recorded male was 5.88 m (19.3 ft) and the tallest recorded female was 5.17 m (17.0 ft) tall.[44][47] The average weight is 1,192 kg (2,628 lb) for an adult male and 828 kg (1,825 lb) for an adult female[48] with maximum weights of 1,930 kg (4,250 lb) and 1,180 kg (2,600 lb) having been recorded for males and females, respectively.[45][46] Despite its long neck and legs, the giraffe's body is relatively short.[49]:66 Located at both sides of the head, the giraffe's large, bulging eyes give it good all-round vision from its great height.[50]:25 Giraffes see in colour[50]:26 and their senses of hearing and smell are also sharp.[51] The animal can close its muscular nostrils to protect against sandstorms and ants.[50]:27
+The giraffe's prehensile tongue is about 45 cm (18 in) long.[45][46] It is purplish-black in colour, perhaps to protect against sunburn, and is useful for grasping foliage, as well as for grooming and cleaning the animal's nose.[50]:27 The upper lip of the giraffe is also prehensile and useful when foraging, and is covered in hair to protect against thorns. The tongue and inside of the mouth are covered in papillae.[7]
+The coat has dark blotches or patches (which can be orange, chestnut, brown, or nearly black in colour[51]) separated by light hair (usually white or cream in colour.[51]) Male giraffes become darker as they age.[42] The coat pattern has been claimed to serve as camouflage in the light and shade patterns of savannah woodlands.[43] When standing among trees and bushes, they are hard to see at even a few metres distance. However, adult giraffes move about to gain the best view of an approaching predator, relying on their size and ability to defend themselves rather than on camouflage, which may be more important for calves.[10] Giraffe calves inherit some spot pattern traits from their mothers, and variation in some spot traits are correlated with neonatal survival.[52] The skin underneath the dark areas may serve as windows for thermoregulation, being sites for complex blood vessel systems and large sweat glands.[53] Each individual giraffe has a unique coat pattern.[42]
+The skin of a giraffe is mostly gray,[48] or tan.[54] Its thickness allows the animal to run through thorn bushes without being punctured.[50]:34 The fur may serve as a chemical defence, as its parasite repellents give the animal a characteristic scent. At least 11 main aromatic chemicals are in the fur, although indole and 3-methylindole are responsible for most of the smell. Because the males have a stronger odour than the females, the odour may also have sexual function.[55] Along the animal's neck is a mane made of short, erect hairs.[7] The one-metre (3.3-ft) tail ends in a long, dark tuft of hair and is used as a defense against insects.[50]:36
+Both sexes have prominent horn-like structures called ossicones, which are formed from ossified cartilage, covered in skin and fused to the skull at the parietal bones.[42] Being vascularized, the ossicones may have a role in thermoregulation,[53] and are also used in combat between males.[56] Appearance is a reliable guide to the sex or age of a giraffe: the ossicones of females and young are thin and display tufts of hair on top, whereas those of adult males end in knobs and tend to be bald on top.[42] Also, a median lump, which is more prominent in males, emerges at the front of the skull.[7] Males develop calcium deposits that form bumps on their skulls as they age.[51] A giraffe's skull is lightened by multiple sinuses.[49]:70 However, as males age, their skulls become heavier and more club-like, helping them become more dominant in combat.[42] The upper jaw has a grooved palate and lacks front teeth.[50]:26 The giraffe's molars have a rough surface.[50]:27
+The front and back legs of a giraffe are about the same length. The radius and ulna of the front legs are articulated by the carpus, which, while structurally equivalent to the human wrist, functions as a knee.[57] It appears that a suspensory ligament allows the lanky legs to support the animal's great weight.[58] The foot of the giraffe reaches a diameter of 30 cm (12 in), and the hoof is 15 cm (5.9 in) high in males and 10 cm (3.9 in) in females.[50]:36 The rear of each hoof is low and the fetlock is close to the ground, allowing the foot to provide additional support to the animal's weight.[7] Giraffes lack dewclaws and interdigital glands. The giraffe's pelvis, though relatively short, has an ilium that is outspread at the upper ends.[7]
+A giraffe has only two gaits: walking and galloping. Walking is done by moving the legs on one side of the body at the same time, then doing the same on the other side.[42] When galloping, the hind legs move around the front legs before the latter move forward,[51] and the tail will curl up.[42] The animal relies on the forward and backward motions of its head and neck to maintain balance and the counter momentum while galloping.[37]:327��29 The giraffe can reach a sprint speed of up to 60 km/h (37 mph),[59] and can sustain 50 km/h (31 mph) for several kilometres.[60]
+A giraffe rests by lying with its body on top of its folded legs.[37]:329 To lie down, the animal kneels on its front legs and then lowers the rest of its body. To get back up, it first gets on its knees and spreads its hind legs to raise its hindquarters. It then straightens its front legs. With each step, the animal swings its head.[50]:31 In captivity, the giraffe sleeps intermittently around 4.6 hours per day, mostly at night.[61] It usually sleeps lying down; however, standing sleeps have been recorded, particularly in older individuals. Intermittent short "deep sleep" phases while lying are characterised by the giraffe bending its neck backwards and resting its head on the hip or thigh, a position believed to indicate paradoxical sleep.[61] If the giraffe wants to bend down to drink, it either spreads its front legs or bends its knees.[42] Giraffes would probably not be competent swimmers as their long legs would be highly cumbersome in the water,[62] although they could possibly float.[63] When swimming, the thorax would be weighed down by the front legs, making it difficult for the animal to move its neck and legs in harmony[62][63] or keep its head above the surface.[62]
+The giraffe has an extremely elongated neck, which can be up to 2–2.4 m (6.6–7.9 ft) in length, accounting for much of the animal's vertical height.[45][46][50]:29[64] The long neck results from a disproportionate lengthening of the cervical vertebrae, not from the addition of more vertebrae. Each cervical vertebra is over 28 cm (11 in) long.[49]:71 They comprise 52–54 per cent of the length of the giraffe's vertebral column, compared with the 27–33 percent typical of similar large ungulates, including the giraffe's closest living relative, the okapi.[17] This elongation largely takes place after birth, perhaps because giraffe mothers would have a difficult time giving birth to young with the same neck proportions as adults.[65] The giraffe's head and neck are held up by large muscles and a strengthened nuchal ligament, which are anchored by long dorsal spines on the anterior thoracic vertebrae, giving the animal a hump.[7][66]
+The giraffe's neck vertebrae have ball and socket joints.[49]:71 In particular, the atlas–axis joint (C1 and C2) allows the animal to tilt its head vertically and reach more branches with the tongue.[50]:29 The point of articulation between the cervical and thoracic vertebrae of giraffes is shifted to lie between the first and second thoracic vertebrae (T1 and T2), unlike most other ruminants where the articulation is between the seventh cervical vertebra (C7) and T1.[17][65] This allows C7 to contribute directly to increased neck length and has given rise to the suggestion that T1 is actually C8, and that giraffes have added an extra cervical vertebra.[66] However, this proposition is not generally accepted, as T1 has other morphological features, such as an articulating rib, deemed diagnostic of thoracic vertebrae, and because exceptions to the mammalian limit of seven cervical vertebrae are generally characterised by increased neurological anomalies and maladies.[17]
+There are several hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origin and maintenance of elongation in giraffe necks.[56] The "competing browsers hypothesis" was originally suggested by Charles Darwin and challenged only recently. It suggests that competitive pressure from smaller browsers, such as kudu, steenbok and impala, encouraged the elongation of the neck, as it enabled giraffes to reach food that competitors could not. This advantage is real, as giraffes can and do feed up to 4.5 m (15 ft) high, while even quite large competitors, such as kudu, can feed up to only about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) high.[67] There is also research suggesting that browsing competition is intense at lower levels, and giraffes feed more efficiently (gaining more leaf biomass with each mouthful) high in the canopy.[68][69] However, scientists disagree about just how much time giraffes spend feeding at levels beyond the reach of other browsers,[14][56][67][70]
+and a 2010 study found that adult giraffes with longer necks actually suffered higher mortality rates under drought conditions than their shorter-necked counterparts. This study suggests that maintaining a longer neck requires more nutrients, which puts longer-necked giraffes at risk during a food shortage.[71]
+Another theory, the sexual selection hypothesis, proposes that the long necks evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic, giving males an advantage in "necking" contests (see below) to establish dominance and obtain access to sexually receptive females.[14] In support of this theory, necks are longer and heavier for males than females of the same age,[14][56] and the former do not employ other forms of combat.[14] However, one objection is that it fails to explain why female giraffes also have long necks.[72] It has also been proposed that the neck serves to give the animal greater vigilance.[73][74]
+In mammals, the left recurrent laryngeal nerve is longer than the right; in the giraffe it is over 30 cm (12 in) longer. These nerves are longer in the giraffe than in any other living animal;[75] the left nerve is over 2 m (6 ft 7 in) long.[76] Each nerve cell in this path begins in the brainstem and passes down the neck along the vagus nerve, then branches off into the recurrent laryngeal nerve which passes back up the neck to the larynx. Thus, these nerve cells have a length of nearly 5 m (16 ft) in the largest giraffes.[75] The structure of a giraffe's brain resembles that of domestic cattle.[50]:31 It is kept cool by evaporative heat loss in the nasal passages.[53] The shape of the skeleton gives the giraffe a small lung volume relative to its mass. Its long neck gives it a large amount of dead space, in spite of its narrow windpipe. These factors increase the resistance to airflow. Nevertheless, the animal can still supply enough oxygen to its tissues and it can increase its respiratory rate and oxygen diffusion when running.[77]
+The circulatory system of the giraffe has several adaptations for its great height. Its heart, which can weigh more than 11 kg (25 lb) and measures about 60 cm (2 ft) long, must generate approximately double the blood pressure required for a human to maintain blood flow to the brain. As such, the wall of the heart can be as thick as 7.5 cm (3.0 in).[51] Giraffes have unusually high heart rates for their size, at 150 beats per minute.[49]:76 When the animal lowers its head the blood rushes down fairly unopposed and a rete mirabile in the upper neck, with its large cross sectional area, prevents excess blood flow to the brain. When it raises again, the blood vessels constrict and direct blood into the brain so the animal does not faint.[78] The jugular veins contain several (most commonly seven) valves to prevent blood flowing back into the head from the inferior vena cava and right atrium while the head is lowered.[79] Conversely, the blood vessels in the lower legs are under great pressure because of the weight of fluid pressing down on them. To solve this problem, the skin of the lower legs is thick and tight; preventing too much blood from pouring into them.[43]
+Giraffes have oesophageal muscles that are unusually strong to allow regurgitation of food from the stomach up the neck and into the mouth for rumination.[49]:78 They have four chambered stomachs, as in all ruminants, and the first chamber has adapted to their specialised diet.[7] The intestines of an adult giraffe measure more than 70 m (230 ft) in length and have a relatively small ratio of small to large intestine.[80] The liver of the giraffe is small and compact.[49]:76 A gallbladder is generally present during fetal life, but it may disappear before birth.[7][81][82]
+Giraffes usually inhabit savannahs and open woodlands. They prefer Acacieae, Commiphora, Combretum and open Terminalia woodlands over denser environments like Brachystegia woodlands.[37]:322 The Angolan giraffe can be found in desert environments.[83] Giraffes browse on the twigs of trees, preferring trees of the subfamily Acacieae and the genera Commiphora and Terminalia,[4] which are important sources of calcium and protein to sustain the giraffe's growth rate.[10] They also feed on shrubs, grass and fruit.[37]:324 A giraffe eats around 34 kg (75 lb) of foliage daily.[42] When stressed, giraffes may chew the bark off branches. Although herbivorous, the giraffe has been known to visit carcasses and lick dried meat off bones.[37]:325
+During the wet season, food is abundant and giraffes are more spread out, while during the dry season, they gather around the remaining evergreen trees and bushes.[4] Mothers tend to feed in open areas, presumably to make it easier to detect predators, although this may reduce their feeding efficiency.[70] As a ruminant, the giraffe first chews its food, then swallows it for processing and then visibly passes the half-digested cud up the neck and back into the mouth to chew again.[49]:78–79 It is common for a giraffe to salivate while feeding.[50]:27 The giraffe requires less food than many other herbivores because the foliage it eats has more concentrated nutrients and it has a more efficient digestive system.[4] The animal's faeces come in the form of small pellets.[7] When it has access to water, a giraffe drinks at intervals no longer than three days.[42]
+Giraffes have a great effect on the trees that they feed on, delaying the growth of young trees for some years and giving "waistlines" to trees that are too tall. Feeding is at its highest during the first and last hours of daytime. Between these hours, giraffes mostly stand and ruminate. Rumination is the dominant activity during the night, when it is mostly done lying down.[42]
+Giraffes are usually found in groups that vary in size and composition according to ecological, anthropogenic, temporal, and social factors.[84] Traditionally, the composition of these groups had been described as open and ever-changing.[85] For research purposes, a "group" has been defined as "a collection of individuals that are less than a kilometre apart and moving in the same general direction."[86] More recent studies have found that giraffes have long-term social associations and may form groups or pairs based on kinship, sex or other factors. These groups may regularly associate with one another in larger communities or sub-communities within a fission–fusion society.[87][88][89] The number of giraffes in a group can range up to 66 individuals.[89][84]
+Giraffe groups tend to be sex-segregated[89] although mixed-sex groups made of adult females and young males are known to occur. Particularly stable giraffe groups are those made of mothers and their young,[86] which can last weeks or months.[90] Social cohesion in these groups is maintained by the bonds formed between calves.[37]:330[86] Female association appears to be based on space-use and individuals may be matrilineally related.[89] In general, females are more selective than males in who they associate with in regards to individuals of the same sex.[88] Young males also form groups and will engage in playfights. However, as they get older males become more solitary but may also associate in pairs or with female groups.[89][90] Giraffes are not territorial,[7] but they have home ranges that vary according to rainfall and proximity to human settlements.[91] Male giraffes occasionally wander far from areas that they normally frequent.[37]:329
+Although generally quiet and non-vocal, giraffes have been heard to communicate using various sounds. During courtship, males emit loud coughs.[42] Females call their young by bellowing. Calves will emit snorts, bleats, mooing and mewing sounds. Giraffes also snore, hiss, moan, grunt and make flute-like sounds.[42][92] During nighttime, giraffes appear to hum to each other above the infrasound range for purposes which are unclear.[92]
+Reproduction in giraffes is broadly polygamous: a few older males mate with the fertile females. Male giraffes assess female fertility by tasting the female's urine to detect oestrus, in a multi-step process known as the flehmen response.[86][90] Males prefer young adult females over juveniles and older adults.[86] Once an oestrous female is detected, the male will attempt to court her. When courting, dominant males will keep subordinate ones at bay.[90] A courting male may lick a female's tail, rest his head and neck on her body or nudge her with his horns. During copulation, the male stands on his hind legs with his head held up and his front legs resting on the female's sides.[42]
+Giraffe gestation lasts 400–460 days, after which a single calf is normally born, although twins occur on rare occasions.[93] The mother gives birth standing up. The calf emerges head and front legs first, having broken through the fetal membranes, and falls to the ground, severing the umbilical cord.[7] The mother then grooms the newborn and helps it stand up.[50]:40 A newborn giraffe is 1.7–2 m (5.6–6.6 ft) tall.[44][45][46] Within a few hours of birth, the calf can run around and is almost indistinguishable from a one-week-old. However, for the first 1–3 weeks, it spends most of its time hiding;[94] its coat pattern providing camouflage. The ossicones, which have lain flat while it was in the womb, become erect within a few days.[42]
+Mothers with calves will gather in nursery herds, moving or browsing together. Mothers in such a group may sometimes leave their calves with one female while they forage and drink elsewhere. This is known as a "calving pool".[94] Adult males play almost no role in raising the young,[37]:337 although they appear to have friendly interactions.[86] Calves are at risk of predation, and a mother giraffe will stand over her calf and kick at an approaching predator.[42] Females watching calving pools will only alert their own young if they detect a disturbance, although the others will take notice and follow.[94]
+The length time in which offspring stay with their mother varies, though it can last until the female's next calving.[94] Likewise, calves may suckle for only a month[37]:335 or as long as a year.[42][90] Females become sexually mature when they are four years old, while males become mature at four or five years. Spermatogenesis in male giraffes begins at three to four years of age.[95] Males must wait until they are at least seven years old to gain the opportunity to mate.[42][50]:40
+Male giraffes use their necks as weapons in combat, a behaviour known as "necking". Necking is used to establish dominance and males that win necking bouts have greater reproductive success.[14] This behaviour occurs at low or high intensity. In low intensity necking, the combatants rub and lean against each other. The male that can hold itself more erect wins the bout. In high intensity necking, the combatants will spread their front legs and swing their necks at each other, attempting to land blows with their ossicones. The contestants will try to dodge each other's blows and then get ready to counter. The power of a blow depends on the weight of the skull and the arc of the swing.[42] A necking duel can last more than half an hour, depending on how well matched the combatants are.[37]:331 Although most fights do not lead to serious injury, there have been records of broken jaws, broken necks, and even deaths.[14]
+After a duel, it is common for two male giraffes to caress and court each other. Such interactions between males have been found to be more frequent than heterosexual coupling.[96] In one study, up to 94 percent of observed mounting incidents took place between males. The proportion of same-sex activities varied from 30–75 percent. Only one percent of same-sex mounting incidents occurred between females.[97]
+Giraffes have high adult survival probability,[98][99] and an unusually long lifespan compared to other ruminants, up to 38 years.[100] Because of their size, eyesight and powerful kicks, adult giraffes are usually not subject to predation,[42] although lions may regularly prey on individuals up to 550 kg (1,210 lb).[101] Giraffes are the most common food source for the big cats in Kruger National Park, comprising nearly a third of the meat consumed, although only a small portion of the giraffes were probably killed by predators, as a majority of the consumed giraffes appeared to be scavenged.[102][103] Nile crocodiles can also be a threat to giraffes when they bend down to drink.[50] Calves are much more vulnerable than adults and are additionally preyed on by leopards, spotted hyenas and wild dogs.[51] A quarter to a half of giraffe calves reach adulthood.[98][104] Calf survival varies according to the season of birth, with calves born during the dry season having higher survival rates.[105]
+The local, seasonal presence of large herds of migratory wildebeests and zebras reduces predation pressure on giraffe calves and increases their survival probability.[106] In turn, it has been suggested that other ungulates may benefit from associating with giraffes as their height allows them to spot predators from further away. Zebras were found to glean information on predation risk from giraffe body language and spend less time scanning the environment when giraffes are present.[107]
+Some parasites feed on giraffes. They are often hosts for ticks, especially in the area around the genitals, which has thinner skin than other areas. Tick species that commonly feed on giraffes are those of genera Hyalomma, Amblyomma and Rhipicephalus. Giraffes may rely on red-billed and yellow-billed oxpeckers to clean them of ticks and alert them to danger. Giraffes host numerous species of internal parasite and are susceptible to various diseases. They were victims of the (now eradicated) viral illness rinderpest.[7] Giraffes can also suffer from a skin disorder, which comes in the form of wrinkles, lesions or raw fissures. In Tanzania, it appears to be caused by a nematode, and may be further affected by secondary infections. As much as 79% of giraffes show signs of the disease in Ruaha National Park, but it did not cause mortality in Tarangire and is less prevalent in areas with fertile soils.[108][109][110]
+Humans have interacted with giraffes for millennia. They were depicted in art throughout the African continent, including that of the Kiffians, Egyptians, and Kushites.[50]:45–47 The Kiffians were responsible for a life-size rock engraving of two giraffes, dated 8,000 years ago, that has been called the "world's largest rock art petroglyph".[50]:45[111] The San people of southern Africa have medicine dances named after some animals; the giraffe dance is performed to treat head ailments.[112]  How the giraffe got its height has been the subject of various African folktales,[14] including one from eastern Africa which explains that the giraffe grew tall from eating too many magic herbs.[113] According to a tale in Tanzania, the giraffe was given both its height and silence when it asked the creator for the gift of wisdom. It could now see and hear all but it not speak as "silence is wisdom".[114] The Dinka people of the Sudan have traditionally considered the giraffe to be their clan animal and the earthly representative of their deity.[115] The Tugen people of modern Kenya used the giraffe to depict their god Mda.[116]
+The Egyptians gave the giraffe its own hieroglyph, named 'sr' in Old Egyptian and 'mmy' in later periods.[50]:49 They also kept giraffes as pets and shipped them around the Mediterranean.[50]:48–49 The giraffe was also known to the Greeks and Romans, who believed that it was an unnatural hybrid of a camel and a leopard or a panther and called it camelopardalis.[50]:50 The giraffe was among the many animals collected and displayed by the Romans. The first one in Rome was brought in by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and exhibited to the public.[50]:52 With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the housing of giraffes in Europe declined.[50]:54 During the Middle Ages, giraffes were known to Europeans through contact with the Arabs, who revered the giraffe for its peculiar appearance.[51]
+Individual captive giraffes were given celebrity status throughout history. In 1414, a giraffe was shipped from Malindi to Bengal. It was then taken to China by explorer Zheng He and placed in a Ming dynasty zoo. The animal was a source of fascination for the Chinese people, who associated it with the mythical Qilin.[50]:56 The Medici giraffe was a giraffe presented to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1486. It caused a great stir on its arrival in Florence.[117] Zarafa, another famous giraffe, was brought from Egypt to Paris in the early 19th century as a gift from Muhammad Ali of Egypt to Charles X of France. A sensation, the giraffe was the subject of numerous memorabilia or "giraffanalia".[50]:81
+Giraffes continue to have a presence in modern culture. Salvador Dalí depicted them with burning manes in some of his surrealist paintings. Dali considered the giraffe to be a symbol of masculinity, and a flaming giraffe was meant to be a "masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster".[50]:123 Several children's books feature the giraffe, including David A. Ufer's The Giraffe Who Was Afraid of Heights, Giles Andreae's Giraffes Can't Dance and Roald Dahl's The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me. Giraffes have appeared in animated films, as minor characters in Disney's The Lion King and Dumbo, and in more prominent roles in The Wild and in the Madagascar films. Sophie the Giraffe has been a popular teether since 1961. Another famous fictional giraffe is the Toys "R" Us mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe.[50]:127 Giraffes are used to represent innocence in The Last of Us video game series.[118]
+The giraffe has also been used for some scientific experiments and discoveries. Scientists have looked at the properties of giraffe skin when developing suits for astronauts and fighter pilots[49]:76 because the people in these professions are in danger of passing out if blood rushes to their legs. Computer scientists have modeled the coat patterns of several subspecies using reaction–diffusion mechanisms.[119]
+The constellation of Camelopardalis, introduced in the seventeenth century, depicts a giraffe.[50]:119–20 The Tswana people of Botswana traditionally see the constellation Crux as two giraffes – Acrux and Mimosa forming a male, and Gacrux and Delta Crucis forming the female.[120]
+In 2010, giraffes were assessed as Least Concern from a conservation perspective by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but the 2016 assessment categorized giraffes as Vulnerable.[1] Giraffes have been extirpated from much of their historic range including Eritrea, Guinea, Mauritania and Senegal. They may also have disappeared from Angola, Mali, and Nigeria, but have been introduced to Rwanda and Swaziland.[1] The Masai and reticulated subspecies are endangered,[121][122] and the Rothschild subspecies is near threatened.[34] The Nubian subspecies is critically endangered.[123] In 1997, Jonathan Kingdon suggested that the Nubian giraffe was the most threatened of all giraffes;[4] as of 2018[update], it may number about 450 individuals.[123] Private game reserves have contributed to the preservation of giraffe populations in southern Africa.[43]
+Giraffes were probably common targets for hunters throughout Africa.[37] Different parts of their bodies were used for different purposes.[7] Their meat was used for food. The tail hairs served as flyswatters, bracelets, necklaces, and thread.[7][37] Shields, sandals, and drums were made using the skin, and the strings of musical instruments were from the tendons.[7] The smoke from burning giraffe skins was used by the medicine men of Buganda to treat nose bleeds.[37] The Humr people of Kordofan consume the drink Umm Nyolokh, which is prepared from the liver and bone marrow of giraffes. Richard Rudgley hypothesised that Umm Nyolokh might contain DMT.[124] The drink is said to cause hallucinations of giraffes, believed to be the giraffes' ghosts, by the Humr.[125] In the 19th century, European explorers began to hunt them for sport.[50] Habitat destruction has hurt the giraffe, too: in the Sahel, the need for firewood and grazing room for livestock has led to deforestation. Normally, giraffes can coexist with livestock, since they do not directly compete with them.[43] In 2017, severe droughts in northern Kenya have led to increased tensions over land and the killing of wildlife by herders, with giraffe populations being particularly hit.[126]
+Giraffe Manor is a popular hotel in Nairobi that also serves as sanctuary for Rothschild's giraffes.[127] The giraffe is a protected species in most of its range. It is the national animal of Tanzania,[128] and is protected by law.[129] Unauthorised killing can result in imprisonment.[130] The UN backed Convention of Migratory Species selected giraffes for protection in 2017.[131] In 1999, it was estimated that over 140,000 giraffes existed in the wild,[31] but estimations as of 2016 indicate that there are approximately 97,500 members of Giraffa in the wild, down from 155,000 in 1985.[132][133] As of 2010[update], there were more than 1,600 in captivity at Species360-registered zoos (not including non-Species360 zoos or any kept by private people).[30]
+Aerial survey is the most common method of monitoring giraffe population trends in the vast roadless tracts of African landscapes, but aerial methods are known to undercount giraffes. Ground-based survey methods are more accurate and should be used in conjunction with aerial surveys to make accurate estimates of population sizes and trends.[134]

en/2206.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,131 @@

+See Taxonomy
+The giraffe (Giraffa) is an African artiodactyl mammal, the tallest living terrestrial animal and the largest ruminant.  It is traditionally considered to be one species, Giraffa camelopardalis, with nine subspecies. However, the existence of up to eight extant giraffe species has been described, based upon research into the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, as well as morphological measurements of Giraffa. Seven other species are extinct, prehistoric species known from fossils.
+The giraffe's chief distinguishing characteristics are its extremely long neck and legs, its horn-like ossicones, and its distinctive coat patterns. It is classified under the family Giraffidae, along with its closest extant relative, the okapi. Its scattered range extends from Chad in the north to South Africa in the south, and from Niger in the west to Somalia in the east. Giraffes usually inhabit savannahs and woodlands. Their food source is leaves, fruits and flowers of woody plants, primarily acacia species, which they browse at heights most other herbivores cannot reach. They may be preyed on by lions, leopards, spotted hyenas and African wild dogs. Giraffes live in herds of related females and their offspring, or bachelor herds of unrelated adult males, but are gregarious and may gather in large aggregations. Males establish social hierarchies through "necking", which are combat bouts where the neck is used as a weapon. Dominant males gain mating access to females, which bear the sole responsibility for raising the young.
+The giraffe has intrigued various cultures, both ancient and modern, for its peculiar appearance, and has often been featured in paintings, books, and cartoons. It is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as vulnerable to extinction, and has been extirpated from many parts of its former range. Giraffes are still found in numerous national parks and game reserves but estimates as of 2016 indicate that there are approximately 97,500 members of Giraffa in the wild. More than 1,600 were kept in zoos in 2010.
+The name "giraffe" has its earliest known origins in the Arabic word zarāfah (زرافة),[2] perhaps borrowed from the animal's Somali name geri.[3] The Arab name is translated as "fast-walker".[4] There were several Middle English spellings, such as jarraf, ziraph, and gerfauntz. The Italian form giraffa arose in the 1590s. The modern English form developed around 1600 from the French girafe.[2] "Camelopard" is an archaic English name for the giraffe deriving from the Ancient Greek for camel and leopard, referring to its camel-like shape and its leopard-like colouring.[5][6]
+Living giraffes were originally classified as one species by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. He gave it the binomial name Cervus camelopardalis. Morten Thrane Brünnich classified the genus Giraffa in 1772.[7] The species name camelopardalis is from Latin.[8]
+Tragulidae
+Antilocapridae
+Giraffidae
+Cervidae
+Bovidae
+Moschidae
+The giraffe is one of only two living genera of the family Giraffidae in the order Artiodactyla, the other being the okapi. The family was once much more extensive, with over 10 fossil genera described. Their closest known relatives may have been the extinct deer-like climacocerids. They, together with the family Antilocapridae (whose only extant species is the pronghorn), have been placed in the superfamily Giraffoidea. These animals may have evolved from the extinct family Palaeomerycidae which might also have been the ancestor of deer.[10]
+The elongation of the neck appears to have started early in the giraffe lineage. Comparisons between giraffes and their ancient relatives suggest that vertebrae close to the skull lengthened earlier, followed by lengthening of vertebrae further down.[11] One early giraffid ancestor was Canthumeryx which has been dated variously to have lived 25–20 million years ago (mya), 17–15 mya or 18–14.3 mya and whose deposits have been found in Libya. This animal was medium-sized, slender and antelope-like. Giraffokeryx appeared 15 mya in the Indian subcontinent and resembled an okapi or a small giraffe, and had a longer neck and similar ossicones.[10] Giraffokeryx may have shared a clade with more massively built giraffids like Sivatherium and Bramatherium.[11]
+Giraffids like Palaeotragus, Shansitherium and Samotherium appeared 14 mya and lived throughout Africa and Eurasia. These animals had bare ossicones and small cranial sinuses and were longer with broader skulls.[10][11] Paleotragus resembled the okapi and may have been its ancestor.[10] Others find that the okapi lineage diverged earlier, before Giraffokeryx.[11] Samotherium was a particularly important transitional fossil in the giraffe lineage as its cervical vertebrae was intermediate in length and structure between a modern giraffe and an okapi, and was more vertical than the okapi's.[12] Bohlinia, which first appeared in southeastern Europe and lived 9–7 mya was likely a direct ancestor of the giraffe. Bohlinia closely resembled modern giraffes, having a long neck and legs and similar ossicones and dentition.[10]
+Bohlinia entered China and northern India in response to climate change. From there, the genus Giraffa evolved and, around 7 mya, entered Africa.[13] Further climate changes caused the extinction of the Asian giraffes, while the African giraffes survived and radiated into several new species. Living giraffes appear to have arisen around 1 mya in eastern Africa during the Pleistocene.[10] Some biologists suggest the modern giraffes descended from G. jumae;[14] others find G. gracilis a more likely candidate.[10] G. jumae was larger and more heavily built while G. gracilis was smaller and more lightly built. The main driver for the evolution of the giraffes is believed to have been the changes from extensive forests to more open habitats, which began 8 mya.[10] During this time, tropical plants disappeared and were replaced by arid C4 plants, and a dry savannah emerged across eastern and northern Africa and western India.[15][16] Some researchers have hypothesised that this new habitat coupled with a different diet, including acacia species, may have exposed giraffe ancestors to toxins that caused higher mutation rates and a higher rate of evolution.[17] The coat patterns of modern giraffes may also have coincided with these habitat changes. Asian giraffes are hypothesised to have had more okapi-like colourations.[10]
+The giraffe genome is around 2.9 billion base pairs in length compared to the 3.3 billion base pairs of the okapi. Of the proteins in giraffe and okapi genes, 19.4% are identical. The two species are equally distantly related to cattle, suggesting the giraffe's unique characteristics are not because of faster evolution. The divergence of giraffe and okapi lineages dates to around 11.5 mya. A small group of regulatory genes in the giraffe appear to be responsible for the animal's stature and associated circulatory adaptations.[18]
+The IUCN currently recognises only one species of giraffe with nine subspecies.[20][21] In 2001, a two-species taxonomy was proposed.[22] A 2007 study on the genetics of giraffes, suggested they were six species: the West African, Rothschild's, reticulated, Masai, Angolan, and South African giraffe. The study deduced from genetic differences in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that giraffes from these populations are reproductively isolated and rarely interbreed, though no natural obstacles block their mutual access. This includes adjacent populations of Rothschild's, reticulated, and Masai giraffes. The Masai giraffe was also suggested to consist of possibly two species separated by the Rift Valley. Reticulated and Masai giraffes were found to have the highest mtDNA diversity, which is consistent with giraffes originating in eastern Africa. Populations further north are more closely related to the former, while those to the south are more related to the latter. Giraffes appear to select mates of the same coat type, which are imprinted on them as calves.[19]
+A 2011 study using detailed analyses of the morphology of giraffes, and application of the phylogenetic species concept, described eight species of living giraffes.[23] A 2016 study also concluded that living giraffes consist of multiple species.[24] The researchers suggested the existence of four species, which have not exchanged genetic information between each other for 1 to 2 million years. Since then, a response to this publication has been published, highlighting seven problems in data interpretation, and concludes "the conclusions should not be accepted unconditionally".[25]
+A 2020 study showed that depending on the method chosen, different taxonomic hypotheses recognizing from two to six species, can be considered for the genus Giraffa. That study also found that multi species coalescent methods can lead to taxonomic over-splitting, as those methods delimit geographic structure rather than species. The 3-species hypothesis, which recognises G. camelopardalis, G. giraffa, and G. tippelskirchi, is highly supported by phylogenetic analyses and also corroborated by most population genetic and multi species coalescent analyses.[26]
+There are also seven extinct species of giraffe, listed as the following:
+G. attica, also extinct, was formerly considered part of Giraffa but was reclassified as Bohlinia attica in 1929.
+The Rothschild's giraffe (G. c. rothschildi) may be an ecotype of G. camelopardalis. Its range includes parts of Uganda and Kenya.[21] Its presence in South Sudan is uncertain.[34] This giraffe has large dark patches that usually have complete margins, but may also have sharp edges. The dark spots may also have paler radiating lines or streaks within them. Spotting does not often reach below the hocks and almost never to the hooves. This ecotype may also develop five "horns".[29]:53 Around 1,500 individuals believed to remain in the wild,[21] and more than 450 are kept in zoos.[30] According to genetic analysis circa September 2016, it is conspecific with the Nubian giraffe (G. c. camelopardalis).[24]
+Fully grown giraffes stand 4.3–5.7 m (14.1–18.7 ft) tall, with males taller than females.[44][45][46] The tallest recorded male was 5.88 m (19.3 ft) and the tallest recorded female was 5.17 m (17.0 ft) tall.[44][47] The average weight is 1,192 kg (2,628 lb) for an adult male and 828 kg (1,825 lb) for an adult female[48] with maximum weights of 1,930 kg (4,250 lb) and 1,180 kg (2,600 lb) having been recorded for males and females, respectively.[45][46] Despite its long neck and legs, the giraffe's body is relatively short.[49]:66 Located at both sides of the head, the giraffe's large, bulging eyes give it good all-round vision from its great height.[50]:25 Giraffes see in colour[50]:26 and their senses of hearing and smell are also sharp.[51] The animal can close its muscular nostrils to protect against sandstorms and ants.[50]:27
+The giraffe's prehensile tongue is about 45 cm (18 in) long.[45][46] It is purplish-black in colour, perhaps to protect against sunburn, and is useful for grasping foliage, as well as for grooming and cleaning the animal's nose.[50]:27 The upper lip of the giraffe is also prehensile and useful when foraging, and is covered in hair to protect against thorns. The tongue and inside of the mouth are covered in papillae.[7]
+The coat has dark blotches or patches (which can be orange, chestnut, brown, or nearly black in colour[51]) separated by light hair (usually white or cream in colour.[51]) Male giraffes become darker as they age.[42] The coat pattern has been claimed to serve as camouflage in the light and shade patterns of savannah woodlands.[43] When standing among trees and bushes, they are hard to see at even a few metres distance. However, adult giraffes move about to gain the best view of an approaching predator, relying on their size and ability to defend themselves rather than on camouflage, which may be more important for calves.[10] Giraffe calves inherit some spot pattern traits from their mothers, and variation in some spot traits are correlated with neonatal survival.[52] The skin underneath the dark areas may serve as windows for thermoregulation, being sites for complex blood vessel systems and large sweat glands.[53] Each individual giraffe has a unique coat pattern.[42]
+The skin of a giraffe is mostly gray,[48] or tan.[54] Its thickness allows the animal to run through thorn bushes without being punctured.[50]:34 The fur may serve as a chemical defence, as its parasite repellents give the animal a characteristic scent. At least 11 main aromatic chemicals are in the fur, although indole and 3-methylindole are responsible for most of the smell. Because the males have a stronger odour than the females, the odour may also have sexual function.[55] Along the animal's neck is a mane made of short, erect hairs.[7] The one-metre (3.3-ft) tail ends in a long, dark tuft of hair and is used as a defense against insects.[50]:36
+Both sexes have prominent horn-like structures called ossicones, which are formed from ossified cartilage, covered in skin and fused to the skull at the parietal bones.[42] Being vascularized, the ossicones may have a role in thermoregulation,[53] and are also used in combat between males.[56] Appearance is a reliable guide to the sex or age of a giraffe: the ossicones of females and young are thin and display tufts of hair on top, whereas those of adult males end in knobs and tend to be bald on top.[42] Also, a median lump, which is more prominent in males, emerges at the front of the skull.[7] Males develop calcium deposits that form bumps on their skulls as they age.[51] A giraffe's skull is lightened by multiple sinuses.[49]:70 However, as males age, their skulls become heavier and more club-like, helping them become more dominant in combat.[42] The upper jaw has a grooved palate and lacks front teeth.[50]:26 The giraffe's molars have a rough surface.[50]:27
+The front and back legs of a giraffe are about the same length. The radius and ulna of the front legs are articulated by the carpus, which, while structurally equivalent to the human wrist, functions as a knee.[57] It appears that a suspensory ligament allows the lanky legs to support the animal's great weight.[58] The foot of the giraffe reaches a diameter of 30 cm (12 in), and the hoof is 15 cm (5.9 in) high in males and 10 cm (3.9 in) in females.[50]:36 The rear of each hoof is low and the fetlock is close to the ground, allowing the foot to provide additional support to the animal's weight.[7] Giraffes lack dewclaws and interdigital glands. The giraffe's pelvis, though relatively short, has an ilium that is outspread at the upper ends.[7]
+A giraffe has only two gaits: walking and galloping. Walking is done by moving the legs on one side of the body at the same time, then doing the same on the other side.[42] When galloping, the hind legs move around the front legs before the latter move forward,[51] and the tail will curl up.[42] The animal relies on the forward and backward motions of its head and neck to maintain balance and the counter momentum while galloping.[37]:327��29 The giraffe can reach a sprint speed of up to 60 km/h (37 mph),[59] and can sustain 50 km/h (31 mph) for several kilometres.[60]
+A giraffe rests by lying with its body on top of its folded legs.[37]:329 To lie down, the animal kneels on its front legs and then lowers the rest of its body. To get back up, it first gets on its knees and spreads its hind legs to raise its hindquarters. It then straightens its front legs. With each step, the animal swings its head.[50]:31 In captivity, the giraffe sleeps intermittently around 4.6 hours per day, mostly at night.[61] It usually sleeps lying down; however, standing sleeps have been recorded, particularly in older individuals. Intermittent short "deep sleep" phases while lying are characterised by the giraffe bending its neck backwards and resting its head on the hip or thigh, a position believed to indicate paradoxical sleep.[61] If the giraffe wants to bend down to drink, it either spreads its front legs or bends its knees.[42] Giraffes would probably not be competent swimmers as their long legs would be highly cumbersome in the water,[62] although they could possibly float.[63] When swimming, the thorax would be weighed down by the front legs, making it difficult for the animal to move its neck and legs in harmony[62][63] or keep its head above the surface.[62]
+The giraffe has an extremely elongated neck, which can be up to 2–2.4 m (6.6–7.9 ft) in length, accounting for much of the animal's vertical height.[45][46][50]:29[64] The long neck results from a disproportionate lengthening of the cervical vertebrae, not from the addition of more vertebrae. Each cervical vertebra is over 28 cm (11 in) long.[49]:71 They comprise 52–54 per cent of the length of the giraffe's vertebral column, compared with the 27–33 percent typical of similar large ungulates, including the giraffe's closest living relative, the okapi.[17] This elongation largely takes place after birth, perhaps because giraffe mothers would have a difficult time giving birth to young with the same neck proportions as adults.[65] The giraffe's head and neck are held up by large muscles and a strengthened nuchal ligament, which are anchored by long dorsal spines on the anterior thoracic vertebrae, giving the animal a hump.[7][66]
+The giraffe's neck vertebrae have ball and socket joints.[49]:71 In particular, the atlas–axis joint (C1 and C2) allows the animal to tilt its head vertically and reach more branches with the tongue.[50]:29 The point of articulation between the cervical and thoracic vertebrae of giraffes is shifted to lie between the first and second thoracic vertebrae (T1 and T2), unlike most other ruminants where the articulation is between the seventh cervical vertebra (C7) and T1.[17][65] This allows C7 to contribute directly to increased neck length and has given rise to the suggestion that T1 is actually C8, and that giraffes have added an extra cervical vertebra.[66] However, this proposition is not generally accepted, as T1 has other morphological features, such as an articulating rib, deemed diagnostic of thoracic vertebrae, and because exceptions to the mammalian limit of seven cervical vertebrae are generally characterised by increased neurological anomalies and maladies.[17]
+There are several hypotheses regarding the evolutionary origin and maintenance of elongation in giraffe necks.[56] The "competing browsers hypothesis" was originally suggested by Charles Darwin and challenged only recently. It suggests that competitive pressure from smaller browsers, such as kudu, steenbok and impala, encouraged the elongation of the neck, as it enabled giraffes to reach food that competitors could not. This advantage is real, as giraffes can and do feed up to 4.5 m (15 ft) high, while even quite large competitors, such as kudu, can feed up to only about 2 m (6 ft 7 in) high.[67] There is also research suggesting that browsing competition is intense at lower levels, and giraffes feed more efficiently (gaining more leaf biomass with each mouthful) high in the canopy.[68][69] However, scientists disagree about just how much time giraffes spend feeding at levels beyond the reach of other browsers,[14][56][67][70]
+and a 2010 study found that adult giraffes with longer necks actually suffered higher mortality rates under drought conditions than their shorter-necked counterparts. This study suggests that maintaining a longer neck requires more nutrients, which puts longer-necked giraffes at risk during a food shortage.[71]
+Another theory, the sexual selection hypothesis, proposes that the long necks evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic, giving males an advantage in "necking" contests (see below) to establish dominance and obtain access to sexually receptive females.[14] In support of this theory, necks are longer and heavier for males than females of the same age,[14][56] and the former do not employ other forms of combat.[14] However, one objection is that it fails to explain why female giraffes also have long necks.[72] It has also been proposed that the neck serves to give the animal greater vigilance.[73][74]
+In mammals, the left recurrent laryngeal nerve is longer than the right; in the giraffe it is over 30 cm (12 in) longer. These nerves are longer in the giraffe than in any other living animal;[75] the left nerve is over 2 m (6 ft 7 in) long.[76] Each nerve cell in this path begins in the brainstem and passes down the neck along the vagus nerve, then branches off into the recurrent laryngeal nerve which passes back up the neck to the larynx. Thus, these nerve cells have a length of nearly 5 m (16 ft) in the largest giraffes.[75] The structure of a giraffe's brain resembles that of domestic cattle.[50]:31 It is kept cool by evaporative heat loss in the nasal passages.[53] The shape of the skeleton gives the giraffe a small lung volume relative to its mass. Its long neck gives it a large amount of dead space, in spite of its narrow windpipe. These factors increase the resistance to airflow. Nevertheless, the animal can still supply enough oxygen to its tissues and it can increase its respiratory rate and oxygen diffusion when running.[77]
+The circulatory system of the giraffe has several adaptations for its great height. Its heart, which can weigh more than 11 kg (25 lb) and measures about 60 cm (2 ft) long, must generate approximately double the blood pressure required for a human to maintain blood flow to the brain. As such, the wall of the heart can be as thick as 7.5 cm (3.0 in).[51] Giraffes have unusually high heart rates for their size, at 150 beats per minute.[49]:76 When the animal lowers its head the blood rushes down fairly unopposed and a rete mirabile in the upper neck, with its large cross sectional area, prevents excess blood flow to the brain. When it raises again, the blood vessels constrict and direct blood into the brain so the animal does not faint.[78] The jugular veins contain several (most commonly seven) valves to prevent blood flowing back into the head from the inferior vena cava and right atrium while the head is lowered.[79] Conversely, the blood vessels in the lower legs are under great pressure because of the weight of fluid pressing down on them. To solve this problem, the skin of the lower legs is thick and tight; preventing too much blood from pouring into them.[43]
+Giraffes have oesophageal muscles that are unusually strong to allow regurgitation of food from the stomach up the neck and into the mouth for rumination.[49]:78 They have four chambered stomachs, as in all ruminants, and the first chamber has adapted to their specialised diet.[7] The intestines of an adult giraffe measure more than 70 m (230 ft) in length and have a relatively small ratio of small to large intestine.[80] The liver of the giraffe is small and compact.[49]:76 A gallbladder is generally present during fetal life, but it may disappear before birth.[7][81][82]
+Giraffes usually inhabit savannahs and open woodlands. They prefer Acacieae, Commiphora, Combretum and open Terminalia woodlands over denser environments like Brachystegia woodlands.[37]:322 The Angolan giraffe can be found in desert environments.[83] Giraffes browse on the twigs of trees, preferring trees of the subfamily Acacieae and the genera Commiphora and Terminalia,[4] which are important sources of calcium and protein to sustain the giraffe's growth rate.[10] They also feed on shrubs, grass and fruit.[37]:324 A giraffe eats around 34 kg (75 lb) of foliage daily.[42] When stressed, giraffes may chew the bark off branches. Although herbivorous, the giraffe has been known to visit carcasses and lick dried meat off bones.[37]:325
+During the wet season, food is abundant and giraffes are more spread out, while during the dry season, they gather around the remaining evergreen trees and bushes.[4] Mothers tend to feed in open areas, presumably to make it easier to detect predators, although this may reduce their feeding efficiency.[70] As a ruminant, the giraffe first chews its food, then swallows it for processing and then visibly passes the half-digested cud up the neck and back into the mouth to chew again.[49]:78–79 It is common for a giraffe to salivate while feeding.[50]:27 The giraffe requires less food than many other herbivores because the foliage it eats has more concentrated nutrients and it has a more efficient digestive system.[4] The animal's faeces come in the form of small pellets.[7] When it has access to water, a giraffe drinks at intervals no longer than three days.[42]
+Giraffes have a great effect on the trees that they feed on, delaying the growth of young trees for some years and giving "waistlines" to trees that are too tall. Feeding is at its highest during the first and last hours of daytime. Between these hours, giraffes mostly stand and ruminate. Rumination is the dominant activity during the night, when it is mostly done lying down.[42]
+Giraffes are usually found in groups that vary in size and composition according to ecological, anthropogenic, temporal, and social factors.[84] Traditionally, the composition of these groups had been described as open and ever-changing.[85] For research purposes, a "group" has been defined as "a collection of individuals that are less than a kilometre apart and moving in the same general direction."[86] More recent studies have found that giraffes have long-term social associations and may form groups or pairs based on kinship, sex or other factors. These groups may regularly associate with one another in larger communities or sub-communities within a fission–fusion society.[87][88][89] The number of giraffes in a group can range up to 66 individuals.[89][84]
+Giraffe groups tend to be sex-segregated[89] although mixed-sex groups made of adult females and young males are known to occur. Particularly stable giraffe groups are those made of mothers and their young,[86] which can last weeks or months.[90] Social cohesion in these groups is maintained by the bonds formed between calves.[37]:330[86] Female association appears to be based on space-use and individuals may be matrilineally related.[89] In general, females are more selective than males in who they associate with in regards to individuals of the same sex.[88] Young males also form groups and will engage in playfights. However, as they get older males become more solitary but may also associate in pairs or with female groups.[89][90] Giraffes are not territorial,[7] but they have home ranges that vary according to rainfall and proximity to human settlements.[91] Male giraffes occasionally wander far from areas that they normally frequent.[37]:329
+Although generally quiet and non-vocal, giraffes have been heard to communicate using various sounds. During courtship, males emit loud coughs.[42] Females call their young by bellowing. Calves will emit snorts, bleats, mooing and mewing sounds. Giraffes also snore, hiss, moan, grunt and make flute-like sounds.[42][92] During nighttime, giraffes appear to hum to each other above the infrasound range for purposes which are unclear.[92]
+Reproduction in giraffes is broadly polygamous: a few older males mate with the fertile females. Male giraffes assess female fertility by tasting the female's urine to detect oestrus, in a multi-step process known as the flehmen response.[86][90] Males prefer young adult females over juveniles and older adults.[86] Once an oestrous female is detected, the male will attempt to court her. When courting, dominant males will keep subordinate ones at bay.[90] A courting male may lick a female's tail, rest his head and neck on her body or nudge her with his horns. During copulation, the male stands on his hind legs with his head held up and his front legs resting on the female's sides.[42]
+Giraffe gestation lasts 400–460 days, after which a single calf is normally born, although twins occur on rare occasions.[93] The mother gives birth standing up. The calf emerges head and front legs first, having broken through the fetal membranes, and falls to the ground, severing the umbilical cord.[7] The mother then grooms the newborn and helps it stand up.[50]:40 A newborn giraffe is 1.7–2 m (5.6–6.6 ft) tall.[44][45][46] Within a few hours of birth, the calf can run around and is almost indistinguishable from a one-week-old. However, for the first 1–3 weeks, it spends most of its time hiding;[94] its coat pattern providing camouflage. The ossicones, which have lain flat while it was in the womb, become erect within a few days.[42]
+Mothers with calves will gather in nursery herds, moving or browsing together. Mothers in such a group may sometimes leave their calves with one female while they forage and drink elsewhere. This is known as a "calving pool".[94] Adult males play almost no role in raising the young,[37]:337 although they appear to have friendly interactions.[86] Calves are at risk of predation, and a mother giraffe will stand over her calf and kick at an approaching predator.[42] Females watching calving pools will only alert their own young if they detect a disturbance, although the others will take notice and follow.[94]
+The length time in which offspring stay with their mother varies, though it can last until the female's next calving.[94] Likewise, calves may suckle for only a month[37]:335 or as long as a year.[42][90] Females become sexually mature when they are four years old, while males become mature at four or five years. Spermatogenesis in male giraffes begins at three to four years of age.[95] Males must wait until they are at least seven years old to gain the opportunity to mate.[42][50]:40
+Male giraffes use their necks as weapons in combat, a behaviour known as "necking". Necking is used to establish dominance and males that win necking bouts have greater reproductive success.[14] This behaviour occurs at low or high intensity. In low intensity necking, the combatants rub and lean against each other. The male that can hold itself more erect wins the bout. In high intensity necking, the combatants will spread their front legs and swing their necks at each other, attempting to land blows with their ossicones. The contestants will try to dodge each other's blows and then get ready to counter. The power of a blow depends on the weight of the skull and the arc of the swing.[42] A necking duel can last more than half an hour, depending on how well matched the combatants are.[37]:331 Although most fights do not lead to serious injury, there have been records of broken jaws, broken necks, and even deaths.[14]
+After a duel, it is common for two male giraffes to caress and court each other. Such interactions between males have been found to be more frequent than heterosexual coupling.[96] In one study, up to 94 percent of observed mounting incidents took place between males. The proportion of same-sex activities varied from 30–75 percent. Only one percent of same-sex mounting incidents occurred between females.[97]
+Giraffes have high adult survival probability,[98][99] and an unusually long lifespan compared to other ruminants, up to 38 years.[100] Because of their size, eyesight and powerful kicks, adult giraffes are usually not subject to predation,[42] although lions may regularly prey on individuals up to 550 kg (1,210 lb).[101] Giraffes are the most common food source for the big cats in Kruger National Park, comprising nearly a third of the meat consumed, although only a small portion of the giraffes were probably killed by predators, as a majority of the consumed giraffes appeared to be scavenged.[102][103] Nile crocodiles can also be a threat to giraffes when they bend down to drink.[50] Calves are much more vulnerable than adults and are additionally preyed on by leopards, spotted hyenas and wild dogs.[51] A quarter to a half of giraffe calves reach adulthood.[98][104] Calf survival varies according to the season of birth, with calves born during the dry season having higher survival rates.[105]
+The local, seasonal presence of large herds of migratory wildebeests and zebras reduces predation pressure on giraffe calves and increases their survival probability.[106] In turn, it has been suggested that other ungulates may benefit from associating with giraffes as their height allows them to spot predators from further away. Zebras were found to glean information on predation risk from giraffe body language and spend less time scanning the environment when giraffes are present.[107]
+Some parasites feed on giraffes. They are often hosts for ticks, especially in the area around the genitals, which has thinner skin than other areas. Tick species that commonly feed on giraffes are those of genera Hyalomma, Amblyomma and Rhipicephalus. Giraffes may rely on red-billed and yellow-billed oxpeckers to clean them of ticks and alert them to danger. Giraffes host numerous species of internal parasite and are susceptible to various diseases. They were victims of the (now eradicated) viral illness rinderpest.[7] Giraffes can also suffer from a skin disorder, which comes in the form of wrinkles, lesions or raw fissures. In Tanzania, it appears to be caused by a nematode, and may be further affected by secondary infections. As much as 79% of giraffes show signs of the disease in Ruaha National Park, but it did not cause mortality in Tarangire and is less prevalent in areas with fertile soils.[108][109][110]
+Humans have interacted with giraffes for millennia. They were depicted in art throughout the African continent, including that of the Kiffians, Egyptians, and Kushites.[50]:45–47 The Kiffians were responsible for a life-size rock engraving of two giraffes, dated 8,000 years ago, that has been called the "world's largest rock art petroglyph".[50]:45[111] The San people of southern Africa have medicine dances named after some animals; the giraffe dance is performed to treat head ailments.[112]  How the giraffe got its height has been the subject of various African folktales,[14] including one from eastern Africa which explains that the giraffe grew tall from eating too many magic herbs.[113] According to a tale in Tanzania, the giraffe was given both its height and silence when it asked the creator for the gift of wisdom. It could now see and hear all but it not speak as "silence is wisdom".[114] The Dinka people of the Sudan have traditionally considered the giraffe to be their clan animal and the earthly representative of their deity.[115] The Tugen people of modern Kenya used the giraffe to depict their god Mda.[116]
+The Egyptians gave the giraffe its own hieroglyph, named 'sr' in Old Egyptian and 'mmy' in later periods.[50]:49 They also kept giraffes as pets and shipped them around the Mediterranean.[50]:48–49 The giraffe was also known to the Greeks and Romans, who believed that it was an unnatural hybrid of a camel and a leopard or a panther and called it camelopardalis.[50]:50 The giraffe was among the many animals collected and displayed by the Romans. The first one in Rome was brought in by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and exhibited to the public.[50]:52 With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the housing of giraffes in Europe declined.[50]:54 During the Middle Ages, giraffes were known to Europeans through contact with the Arabs, who revered the giraffe for its peculiar appearance.[51]
+Individual captive giraffes were given celebrity status throughout history. In 1414, a giraffe was shipped from Malindi to Bengal. It was then taken to China by explorer Zheng He and placed in a Ming dynasty zoo. The animal was a source of fascination for the Chinese people, who associated it with the mythical Qilin.[50]:56 The Medici giraffe was a giraffe presented to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1486. It caused a great stir on its arrival in Florence.[117] Zarafa, another famous giraffe, was brought from Egypt to Paris in the early 19th century as a gift from Muhammad Ali of Egypt to Charles X of France. A sensation, the giraffe was the subject of numerous memorabilia or "giraffanalia".[50]:81
+Giraffes continue to have a presence in modern culture. Salvador Dalí depicted them with burning manes in some of his surrealist paintings. Dali considered the giraffe to be a symbol of masculinity, and a flaming giraffe was meant to be a "masculine cosmic apocalyptic monster".[50]:123 Several children's books feature the giraffe, including David A. Ufer's The Giraffe Who Was Afraid of Heights, Giles Andreae's Giraffes Can't Dance and Roald Dahl's The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me. Giraffes have appeared in animated films, as minor characters in Disney's The Lion King and Dumbo, and in more prominent roles in The Wild and in the Madagascar films. Sophie the Giraffe has been a popular teether since 1961. Another famous fictional giraffe is the Toys "R" Us mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe.[50]:127 Giraffes are used to represent innocence in The Last of Us video game series.[118]
+The giraffe has also been used for some scientific experiments and discoveries. Scientists have looked at the properties of giraffe skin when developing suits for astronauts and fighter pilots[49]:76 because the people in these professions are in danger of passing out if blood rushes to their legs. Computer scientists have modeled the coat patterns of several subspecies using reaction–diffusion mechanisms.[119]
+The constellation of Camelopardalis, introduced in the seventeenth century, depicts a giraffe.[50]:119–20 The Tswana people of Botswana traditionally see the constellation Crux as two giraffes – Acrux and Mimosa forming a male, and Gacrux and Delta Crucis forming the female.[120]
+In 2010, giraffes were assessed as Least Concern from a conservation perspective by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but the 2016 assessment categorized giraffes as Vulnerable.[1] Giraffes have been extirpated from much of their historic range including Eritrea, Guinea, Mauritania and Senegal. They may also have disappeared from Angola, Mali, and Nigeria, but have been introduced to Rwanda and Swaziland.[1] The Masai and reticulated subspecies are endangered,[121][122] and the Rothschild subspecies is near threatened.[34] The Nubian subspecies is critically endangered.[123] In 1997, Jonathan Kingdon suggested that the Nubian giraffe was the most threatened of all giraffes;[4] as of 2018[update], it may number about 450 individuals.[123] Private game reserves have contributed to the preservation of giraffe populations in southern Africa.[43]
+Giraffes were probably common targets for hunters throughout Africa.[37] Different parts of their bodies were used for different purposes.[7] Their meat was used for food. The tail hairs served as flyswatters, bracelets, necklaces, and thread.[7][37] Shields, sandals, and drums were made using the skin, and the strings of musical instruments were from the tendons.[7] The smoke from burning giraffe skins was used by the medicine men of Buganda to treat nose bleeds.[37] The Humr people of Kordofan consume the drink Umm Nyolokh, which is prepared from the liver and bone marrow of giraffes. Richard Rudgley hypothesised that Umm Nyolokh might contain DMT.[124] The drink is said to cause hallucinations of giraffes, believed to be the giraffes' ghosts, by the Humr.[125] In the 19th century, European explorers began to hunt them for sport.[50] Habitat destruction has hurt the giraffe, too: in the Sahel, the need for firewood and grazing room for livestock has led to deforestation. Normally, giraffes can coexist with livestock, since they do not directly compete with them.[43] In 2017, severe droughts in northern Kenya have led to increased tensions over land and the killing of wildlife by herders, with giraffe populations being particularly hit.[126]
+Giraffe Manor is a popular hotel in Nairobi that also serves as sanctuary for Rothschild's giraffes.[127] The giraffe is a protected species in most of its range. It is the national animal of Tanzania,[128] and is protected by law.[129] Unauthorised killing can result in imprisonment.[130] The UN backed Convention of Migratory Species selected giraffes for protection in 2017.[131] In 1999, it was estimated that over 140,000 giraffes existed in the wild,[31] but estimations as of 2016 indicate that there are approximately 97,500 members of Giraffa in the wild, down from 155,000 in 1985.[132][133] As of 2010[update], there were more than 1,600 in captivity at Species360-registered zoos (not including non-Species360 zoos or any kept by private people).[30]
+Aerial survey is the most common method of monitoring giraffe population trends in the vast roadless tracts of African landscapes, but aerial methods are known to undercount giraffes. Ground-based survey methods are more accurate and should be used in conjunction with aerial surveys to make accurate estimates of population sizes and trends.[134]

en/2207.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,159 @@

+Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef or placer deposit. These deposits form a mineralized package that is of economic interest to the miner.
+Ores recovered by mining include metals, coal, oil shale, gemstones, limestone, chalk, dimension stone, rock salt, potash, gravel, and clay. Mining is required to obtain any material that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or even water.
+Mining of stones and metal has been a human activity since pre-historic times. Modern mining processes involve prospecting for ore bodies, analysis of the profit potential of a proposed mine, extraction of the desired materials, and final reclamation of the land after the mine is closed.[1]
+Mining operations usually create a negative environmental impact, both during the mining activity and after the mine has closed. Hence, most of the world's nations have passed regulations to decrease the impact. Work safety has long been a concern as well, and modern practices have significantly improved safety in mines.
+Levels of metal recycling are generally low. Unless future end-of-life recycling rates are stepped up, some rare metals may become unavailable for use in a variety of consumer products. Due to the low recycling rates, some landfills now contain higher concentrations of metal than mines themselves.[2]
+Since the beginning of civilization, people have used stone, ceramics and, later, metals found close to the Earth's surface. These were used to make early tools and weapons; for example, high quality flint found in northern France, southern England and Poland was used to create flint tools.[3] Flint mines have been found in chalk areas where seams of the stone were followed underground by shafts and galleries. The mines at Grimes Graves and Krzemionki are especially famous, and like most other flint mines, are Neolithic in origin (c. 4000–3000 BC). Other hard rocks mined or collected for axes included the greenstone of the Langdale axe industry based in the English Lake District.
+The oldest-known mine on archaeological record is the Ngwenya Mine in Eswatini (Swaziland), which radiocarbon dating shows to be about 43,000 years old. At this site Paleolithic humans mined hematite to make the red pigment ochre.[4][5] Mines of a similar age in Hungary are believed to be sites where Neanderthals may have mined flint for weapons and tools.[6]
+Ancient Egyptians mined malachite at Maadi.[7] At first, Egyptians used the bright green malachite stones for ornamentations and pottery. Later, between 2613 and 2494 BC, large building projects required expeditions abroad to the area of Wadi Maghareh in order to secure minerals and other resources not available in Egypt itself.[8] Quarries for turquoise and copper were also found at Wadi Hammamat, Tura, Aswan and various other Nubian sites on the Sinai Peninsula and at Timna.[8]
+Mining in Egypt occurred in the earliest dynasties. The gold mines of Nubia were among the largest and most extensive of any in Ancient Egypt. These mines are described by the Greek author Diodorus Siculus, who mentions fire-setting as one method used to break down the hard rock holding the gold. One of the complexes is shown in one of the earliest known maps. The miners crushed the ore and ground it to a fine powder before washing the powder for the gold dust.
+Mining in Europe has a very long history. Examples include the silver mines of Laurium, which helped support the Greek city state of Athens. Although they had over 20,000 slaves working them, their technology was essentially identical to their Bronze Age predecessors.[9] At other mines, such as on the island of Thassos, marble was quarried by the Parians after they arrived in the 7th century BC.[10] The marble was shipped away and was later found by archaeologists to have been used in buildings including the tomb of Amphipolis. Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, captured the gold mines of Mount Pangeo in 357 BC to fund his military campaigns.[11] He also captured gold mines in Thrace for minting coinage, eventually producing 26 tons per year.
+However, it was the Romans who developed large scale mining methods, especially the use of large volumes of water brought to the minehead by numerous aqueducts. The water was used for a variety of purposes, including removing overburden and rock debris, called hydraulic mining, as well as washing comminuted, or crushed, ores and driving simple machinery.
+The Romans used hydraulic mining methods on a large scale to prospect for the veins of ore, especially a now-obsolete form of mining known as hushing. They built numerous aqueducts to supply water to the minehead. There, the water stored in large reservoirs and tanks. When a full tank was opened, the flood of water sluiced away the overburden to expose the bedrock underneath and any gold veins. The rock was then worked upon by fire-setting to heat the rock, which would be quenched with a stream of water. The resulting thermal shock cracked the rock, enabling it to be removed by further streams of water from the overhead tanks. The Roman miners used similar methods to work cassiterite deposits in Cornwall and lead ore in the Pennines.
+The methods had been developed by the Romans in Spain in 25 AD to exploit large alluvial gold deposits, the largest site being at Las Medulas, where seven long aqueducts tapped local rivers and sluiced the deposits. The Romans also exploited the silver present in the argentiferous galena in the mines of Cartagena (Cartago Nova), Linares (Castulo), Plasenzuela and Azuaga, among many others.[12] Spain was one of the most important mining regions, but all regions of the Roman Empire were exploited. In Great Britain the natives had mined minerals for millennia,[13] but after the Roman conquest, the scale of the operations increased dramatically, as the Romans needed Britannia's resources, especially gold, silver, tin, and lead.
+Roman techniques were not limited to surface mining. They followed the ore veins underground once opencast mining was no longer feasible. At Dolaucothi they stoped out the veins and drove adits through bare rock to drain the stopes. The same adits were also used to ventilate the workings, especially important when fire-setting was used. At other parts of the site, they penetrated the water table and dewatered the mines using several kinds of machines, especially reverse overshot water-wheels. These were used extensively in the copper mines at Rio Tinto in Spain, where one sequence comprised 16 such wheels arranged in pairs, and lifting water about 24 metres (79 ft). They were worked as treadmills with miners standing on the top slats. Many examples of such devices have been found in old Roman mines and some examples are now preserved in the British Museum and the National Museum of Wales.[14]
+Mining as an industry underwent dramatic changes in medieval Europe. The mining industry in the early Middle Ages was mainly focused on the extraction of copper and iron. Other precious metals were also used, mainly for gilding or coinage. Initially, many metals were obtained through open-pit mining, and ore was primarily extracted from shallow depths, rather than through deep mine shafts. Around the 14th century, the growing use of weapons, armour, stirrups, and horseshoes greatly increased the demand for iron. Medieval knights, for example, were often laden with up to 100 pounds (45 kg) of plate or chain link armour in addition to swords, lances and other weapons.[15] The overwhelming dependency on iron for military purposes spurred iron production and extraction processes.
+The silver crisis of 1465 occurred when all mines had reached depths at which the shafts could no longer be pumped dry with the available technology.[16] Although an increased use of banknotes, credit and copper coins during this period did decrease the value of, and dependence on, precious metals, gold and silver still remained vital to the story of medieval mining.
+Due to differences in the social structure of society, the increasing extraction of mineral deposits spread from central Europe to England in the mid-sixteenth century. On the continent, mineral deposits belonged to the crown, and this regalian right was stoutly maintained. But in England, royal mining rights were restricted to gold and silver (of which England had virtually no deposits) by a judicial decision of 1568 and a law in 1688. England had iron, zinc, copper, lead, and tin ores. Landlords who owned the base metals and coal under their estates then had a strong inducement to extract these metals or to lease the deposits and collect royalties from mine operators. English, German, and Dutch capital combined to finance extraction and refining. Hundreds of German technicians and skilled workers were brought over; in 1642 a colony of 4,000 foreigners was mining and smelting copper at Keswick in the northwestern mountains.[17]
+Use of water power in the form of water mills was extensive. The water mills were employed in crushing ore, raising ore from shafts, and ventilating galleries by powering giant bellows. Black powder was first used in mining in Selmecbánya, Kingdom of Hungary (now Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia) in 1627.[18] Black powder allowed blasting of rock and earth to loosen and reveal ore veins. Blasting was much faster than fire-setting and allowed the mining of previously impenetrable metals and ores.[19] In 1762, the world's first mining academy was established in the same town there.
+The widespread adoption of agricultural innovations such as the iron plowshare, as well as the growing use of metal as a building material, was also a driving force in the tremendous growth of the iron industry during this period. Inventions like the arrastra were often used by the Spanish to pulverize ore after being mined. This device was powered by animals and used the same principles used for grain threshing.[20]
+Much of the knowledge of medieval mining techniques comes from books such as Biringuccio’s De la pirotechnia and probably most importantly from Georg Agricola's De re metallica (1556). These books detail many different mining methods used in German and Saxon mines. A prime issue in medieval mines, which Agricola explains in detail, was the removal of water from mining shafts. As miners dug deeper to access new veins, flooding became a very real obstacle. The mining industry became dramatically more efficient and prosperous with the invention of mechanical and animal driven pumps.
+Mining in the Philippines began around 1000 BC. The early Filipinos worked various mines of gold, silver, copper and iron. Jewels, gold ingots, chains, calombigas and earrings were handed down from antiquity and inherited from their ancestors. Gold dagger handles, gold dishes, tooth plating, and huge gold ornaments were also used.[21] In Laszlo Legeza's "Tantric elements in pre-Hispanic Philippines Gold Art", he mentioned that gold jewelry of Philippine origin was found in Ancient Egypt.[21] According to Antonio Pigafetta, the people of Mindoro possessed great skill in mixing gold with other metals and gave it a natural and perfect appearance that could deceive even the best of silversmiths.[21] The natives were also known for the pieces of jewelry made of other precious stones such as carnelian, agate and pearl. Some outstanding examples of Philippine jewelry included necklaces, belts, armlets and rings placed around the waist.
+During prehistoric times, large amounts of copper was mined along Lake Superior's Keweenaw Peninsula and in nearby Isle Royale; metallic copper was still present near the surface in colonial times.[22][23][24] Indigenous peoples used Lake Superior copper from at least 5,000 years ago;[22] copper tools, arrowheads, and other artifacts that were part of an extensive native trade network have been discovered. In addition, obsidian, flint, and other minerals were mined, worked, and traded.[23] Early French explorers who encountered the sites[clarification needed] made no use of the metals due to the difficulties of transporting them,[23] but the copper was eventually traded throughout the continent along major river routes.
+In the early colonial history of the Americas, "native gold and silver was quickly expropriated and sent back to Spain in fleets of gold- and silver-laden galleons,"[25] the gold and silver originating mostly from mines in Central and South America. Turquoise dated at 700 AD was mined in pre-Columbian America; in the Cerillos Mining District in New Mexico, estimates are that "about 15,000 tons of rock had been removed from Mt. Chalchihuitl using stone tools before 1700."[26][27]
+In 1727, Louis Denys (Denis) (1675–1741), sieur de La Ronde – brother of Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure and the son-in-law of René Chartier – took command of Fort La Pointe at Chequamegon Bay; where natives informed him of an island of copper. La Ronde obtained permission from the French crown to operate mines in 1733, becoming "the first practical miner on Lake Superior"; seven years later, mining was halted by an outbreak between Sioux and Chippewa tribes.[28]
+Mining in the United States became prevalent in the 19th century, and the General Mining Act of 1872 was passed to encourage mining of federal lands.[29] As with the California Gold Rush in the mid-19th century, mining for minerals and precious metals, along with ranching, was a driving factor in the Westward Expansion to the Pacific coast. With the exploration of the West, mining camps were established and "expressed a distinctive spirit, an enduring legacy to the new nation;" Gold Rushers would experience the same problems as the Land Rushers of the transient West that preceded them.[30] Aided by railroads, many traveled West for work opportunities in mining. Western cities such as Denver and Sacramento originated as mining towns.
+When new areas were explored, it was usually the gold (placer and then lode) and then silver that were taken into possession and extracted first. Other metals would often wait for railroads or canals, as coarse gold dust and nuggets do not require smelting and are easy to identify and transport.[24]
+In the early 20th century, the gold and silver rush to the western United States also stimulated mining for coal as well as base metals such as copper, lead, and iron. Areas in modern Montana, Utah, Arizona, and later Alaska became predominate suppliers of copper to the world, which was increasingly demanding copper for electrical and households goods.[31] Canada's mining industry grew more slowly than did the United States' due to limitations in transportation, capital, and U.S. competition; Ontario was the major producer of the early 20th century with nickel, copper, and gold.[31]
+Meanwhile, Australia experienced the Australian gold rushes and by the 1850s was producing 40% of the world's gold, followed by the establishment of large mines such as the Mount Morgan Mine, which ran for nearly a hundred years, Broken Hill ore deposit (one of the largest zinc-lead ore deposits), and the iron ore mines at Iron Knob. After declines in production, another boom in mining occurred in the 1960s. Now, in the early 21st century, Australia remains a major world mineral producer.[32]
+As the 21st century begins, a globalized mining industry of large multinational corporations has arisen. Peak minerals and environmental impacts have also become a concern. Different elements, particularly rare earth minerals, have begun to increase in demand as a result of new technologies.
+The process of mining from discovery of an ore body through extraction of minerals and finally to returning the land to its natural state consists of several distinct steps. The first is discovery of the ore body, which is carried out through prospecting or exploration to find and then define the extent, location and value of the ore body. This leads to a mathematical resource estimation to estimate the size and grade of the deposit.
+This estimation is used to conduct a pre-feasibility study to determine the theoretical economics of the ore deposit. This identifies, early on, whether further investment in estimation and engineering studies is warranted and identifies key risks and areas for further work. The next step is to conduct a feasibility study to evaluate the financial viability, the technical and financial risks, and the robustness of the project.
+This is when the mining company makes the decision whether to develop the mine or to walk away from the project. This includes mine planning to evaluate the economically recoverable portion of the deposit, the metallurgy and ore recoverability, marketability and payability of the ore concentrates, engineering concerns, milling and infrastructure costs, finance and equity requirements, and an analysis of the proposed mine from the initial excavation all the way through to reclamation. The proportion of a deposit that is economically recoverable is dependent on the enrichment factor of the ore in the area.
+To gain access to the mineral deposit within an area it is often necessary to mine through or remove waste material which is not of immediate interest to the miner. The total movement of ore and waste constitutes the mining process. Often more waste than ore is mined during the life of a mine, depending on the nature and location of the ore body. Waste removal and placement is a major cost to the mining operator, so a detailed characterization of the waste material forms an essential part of the geological exploration program for a mining operation.
+Once the analysis determines a given ore body is worth recovering, development begins to create access to the ore body. The mine buildings and processing plants are built, and any necessary equipment is obtained. The operation of the mine to recover the ore begins and continues as long as the company operating the mine finds it economical to do so. Once all the ore that the mine can produce profitably is recovered, reclamation begins to make the land used by the mine suitable for future use.
+Mining techniques can be divided into two common excavation types: surface mining and sub-surface (underground) mining. Today, surface mining is much more common, and produces, for example, 85% of minerals (excluding petroleum and natural gas) in the United States, including 98% of metallic ores.[33]
+Targets are divided into two general categories of materials: placer deposits, consisting of valuable minerals contained within river gravels, beach sands, and other unconsolidated materials; and lode deposits, where valuable minerals are found in veins, in layers, or in mineral grains generally distributed throughout a mass of actual rock. Both types of ore deposit, placer or lode, are mined by both surface and underground methods.
+Some mining, including much of the rare earth elements and uranium mining, is done by less-common methods, such as in-situ leaching: this technique involves digging neither at the surface nor underground. The extraction of target minerals by this technique requires that they be soluble, e.g., potash, potassium chloride, sodium chloride, sodium sulfate, which dissolve in water. Some minerals, such as copper minerals and uranium oxide, require acid or carbonate solutions to dissolve.[34][35]
+Surface mining is done by removing (stripping) surface vegetation, dirt, and, if necessary, layers of bedrock in order to reach buried ore deposits. Techniques of surface mining include: open-pit mining, which is the recovery of materials from an open pit in the ground, quarrying, identical to open-pit mining except that it refers to sand, stone and clay;[36] strip mining, which consists of stripping surface layers off to reveal ore/seams underneath; and mountaintop removal, commonly associated with coal mining, which involves taking the top of a mountain off to reach ore deposits at depth. Most (but not all) placer deposits, because of their shallowly buried nature, are mined by surface methods. Finally, landfill mining involves sites where landfills are excavated and processed.[37] Landfill mining has been thought of as a solution to dealing with long-term methane emissions and local pollution.[38]
+High wall mining is another form of surface mining that evolved from auger mining. In high wall mining, the coal seam is penetrated by a continuous miner propelled by a hydraulic Push-beam Transfer Mechanism (PTM). A typical cycle includes sumping (launch-pushing forward) and shearing (raising and lowering the cutter-head boom to cut the entire height of the coal seam). As the coal recovery cycle continues, the cutter-head is progressively launched into the coal seam for 19.72 feet (6.01 m). Then, the Push-beam Transfer Mechanism (PTM) automatically inserts a 19.72-foot (6.01 m) long rectangular Push-beam (Screw-Conveyor Segment) into the center section of the machine between the Powerhead and the cutter-head. The Push-beam system can penetrate nearly 1,000 feet (300 m) into the coal seam. One patented high wall mining system uses augers enclosed inside the Push-beam that prevent the mined coal from being contaminated by rock debris during the conveyance process. Using a video imaging and/or a gamma ray sensor and/or other Geo-Radar systems like a coal-rock interface detection sensor (CID), the operator can see ahead projection of the seam-rock interface and guide the continuous miner's progress. High wall mining can produce thousands of tons of coal in contour-strip operations with narrow benches, previously mined areas, trench mine applications and steep-dip seams with controlled water-inflow pump system and/or a gas (inert) venting system.
+Sub-surface mining consists of digging tunnels or shafts into the earth to reach buried ore deposits. Ore, for processing, and waste rock, for disposal, are brought to the surface through the tunnels and shafts. Sub-surface mining can be classified by the type of access shafts used, and the extraction method or the technique used to reach the mineral deposit. Drift mining utilizes horizontal access tunnels, slope mining uses diagonally sloping access shafts, and shaft mining utilizes vertical access shafts. Mining in hard and soft rock formations require different techniques.
+Other methods include shrinkage stope mining, which is mining upward, creating a sloping underground room, long wall mining, which is grinding a long ore surface underground, and room and pillar mining, which is removing ore from rooms while leaving pillars in place to support the roof of the room. Room and pillar mining often leads to retreat mining, in which supporting pillars are removed as miners retreat, allowing the room to cave in, thereby loosening more ore. Additional sub-surface mining methods include hard rock mining, which is mining of hard rock (igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary) materials, bore hole mining, drift and fill mining, long hole slope mining, sub level caving, and block caving.
+Heavy machinery is used in mining to explore and develop sites, to remove and stockpile overburden, to break and remove rocks of various hardness and toughness, to process the ore, and to carry out reclamation projects after the mine is closed. Bulldozers, drills, explosives and trucks are all necessary for excavating the land. In the case of placer mining, unconsolidated gravel, or alluvium, is fed into machinery consisting of a hopper and a shaking screen or trommel which frees the desired minerals from the waste gravel. The minerals are then concentrated using sluices or jigs.
+Large drills are used to sink shafts, excavate stopes, and obtain samples for analysis. Trams are used to transport miners, minerals and waste. Lifts carry miners into and out of mines, and move rock and ore out, and machinery in and out, of underground mines. Huge trucks, shovels and cranes are employed in surface mining to move large quantities of overburden and ore. Processing plants utilize large crushers, mills, reactors, roasters and other equipment to consolidate the mineral-rich material and extract the desired compounds and metals from the ore.
+Once the mineral is extracted, it is often then processed. The science of extractive metallurgy is a specialized area in the science of metallurgy that studies the extraction of valuable metals from their ores, especially through chemical or mechanical means.
+Mineral processing (or mineral dressing) is a specialized area in the science of metallurgy that studies the mechanical means of crushing, grinding, and washing that enable the separation (extractive metallurgy) of valuable metals or minerals from their gangue (waste material). Processing of placer ore material consists of gravity-dependent methods of separation, such as sluice boxes. Only minor shaking or washing may be necessary to disaggregate (unclump) the sands or gravels before processing. Processing of ore from a lode mine, whether it is a surface or subsurface mine, requires that the rock ore be crushed and pulverized before extraction of the valuable minerals begins. After lode ore is crushed, recovery of the valuable minerals is done by one, or a combination of several, mechanical and chemical techniques.
+Since most metals are present in ores as oxides or sulfides, the metal needs to be reduced to its metallic form. This can be accomplished through chemical means such as smelting or through electrolytic reduction, as in the case of aluminium. Geometallurgy combines the geologic sciences with extractive metallurgy and mining.
+In 2018, led by Chemistry and Biochemistry professor Bradley D. Smith, University of Notre Dame researchers "invented a new class of molecules whose shape and size enable them to capture and contain precious metal ions," reported in a study published by the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The new method "converts gold-containing ore into chloroauric acid and extracts it using an industrial solvent. The container molecules are able to selectively separate the gold from the solvent without the use of water stripping." The newly developed molecules can eliminate water stripping, whereas mining traditionally "relies on a 125-year-old method that treats gold-containing ore with large quantities of poisonous sodium cyanide...  this new process has a milder environmental impact and that, besides gold, it can be used for capturing other metals such as platinum and palladium," and could also be used in urban mining processes that remove precious metals from wastewater streams.[39]
+Environmental issues can include erosion, formation of sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, and contamination of soil, groundwater and surface water by chemicals from mining processes. In some cases, additional forest logging is done in the vicinity of mines to create space for the storage of the created debris and soil.[40] Contamination resulting from leakage of chemicals can also affect the health of the local population if not properly controlled.[41] Extreme examples of pollution from mining activities include coal fires, which can last for years or even decades, producing massive amounts of environmental damage.
+Mining companies in most countries are required to follow stringent environmental and rehabilitation codes in order to minimize environmental impact and avoid impacting human health. These codes and regulations all require the common steps of environmental impact assessment, development of environmental management plans, mine closure planning (which must be done before the start of mining operations), and environmental monitoring during operation and after closure. However, in some areas, particularly in the developing world, government regulations may not be well enforced.
+For major mining companies and any company seeking international financing, there are a number of other mechanisms to enforce environmental standards. These generally relate to financing standards such as the Equator Principles, IFC environmental standards, and criteria for Socially responsible investing. Mining companies have used this oversight from the financial sector to argue for some level of industry self-regulation.[42] In 1992, a Draft Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations was proposed at the Rio Earth Summit by the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), but the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) together with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) argued successfully for self-regulation instead.[43]
+This was followed by the Global Mining Initiative which was begun by nine of the largest metals and mining companies and which led to the formation of the International Council on Mining and Metals, whose purpose was to "act as a catalyst" in an effort to improve social and environmental performance in the mining and metals industry internationally.[42] The mining industry has provided funding to various conservation groups, some of which have been working with conservation agendas that are at odds with an emerging acceptance of the rights of indigenous people – particularly the right to make land-use decisions.[44]
+Certification of mines with good practices occurs through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). For example, ISO 9000 and ISO 14001, which certify an "auditable environmental management system", involve short inspections, although they have been accused of lacking rigor.[clarification needed][42]:183–84 Certification is also available through Ceres' Global Reporting Initiative, but these reports are voluntary and unverified. Miscellaneous other certification programs exist for various projects, typically through nonprofit groups.[42]:185–86
+The purpose of a 2012 EPS PEAKS paper[45] was to provide evidence on policies managing ecological costs and maximise socio-economic benefits of mining using host country regulatory initiatives. It found existing literature suggesting donors encourage developing countries to:
+Ore mills generate large amounts of waste, called tailings. For example, 99 tons of waste are generated per ton of copper, with even higher ratios in gold mining – because only 5.3 g of gold is extracted per ton of ore, a ton of gold produces 200,000 tons of tailings.[46] (As time goes on and richer deposits are exhausted – and technology improves to permit – this number is going down to .5 g and less.) These tailings can be toxic. Tailings, which are usually produced as a slurry, are most commonly dumped into ponds made from naturally existing valleys.[47] These ponds are secured by impoundments (dams or embankment dams).[47] In 2000 it was estimated that 3,500 tailings impoundments existed, and that every year, 2 to 5 major failures and 35 minor failures occurred;[48] for example, in the Marcopper mining disaster at least 2 million tons of tailings were released into a local river.[48] In 2015, Barrick Gold spilled over 1 million liters of cyanide into a total of five rivers in Argentina near their Veladero mine.[49] In central Finland, Talvivaara Terrafame polymetal mine waste effluent since 2008 and numerous leaks of saline mine water has resulted in ecological collapse of nearby lake.[50] Subaqueous tailings disposal is another option.[47] The mining industry has argued that submarine tailings disposal (STD), which disposes of tailings in the sea, is ideal because it avoids the risks of tailings ponds; although the practice is illegal in the United States and Canada, it is used in the developing world.[51]
+The waste is classified as either sterile or mineralised, with acid generating potential, and the movement and storage of this material forms a major part of the mine planning process. When the mineralised package is determined by an economic cut-off, the near-grade mineralised waste is usually dumped separately with view to later treatment should market conditions change and it becomes economically viable. Civil engineering design parameters are used in the design of the waste dumps, and special conditions apply to high-rainfall areas and to seismically active areas. Waste dump designs must meet all regulatory requirements of the country in whose jurisdiction the mine is located. It is also common practice to rehabilitate dumps to an internationally acceptable standard, which in some cases means that higher standards than the local regulatory standard are applied.[48]
+Many mining sites are remote and not connected to the grid. Electricity is typically generated with diesel generators. Due to high transportation cost and theft during transportation the cost for generating electricity is normally high. Renewable energy applications are becoming an alternative or amendment. Both solar and wind power plants can contribute in saving diesel costs at mining sites. Renewable energy applications have been built at mining sites.[52]
+Cost savings can reach up to 70%.[53]
+Mining exists in many countries. London is known as the capital of global "mining houses" such as Rio Tinto Group, BHP Billiton, and Anglo American PLC.[54] The US mining industry is also large, but it is dominated by the coal and other nonmetal minerals (e.g., rock and sand), and various regulations have worked to reduce the significance of mining in the United States.[54] In 2007 the total market capitalization of mining companies was reported at US$962 billion, which compares to a total global market cap of publicly traded companies of about US$50 trillion in 2007.[55] In 2002, Chile and Peru were reportedly the major mining countries of South America.[56] The mineral industry of Africa includes the mining of various minerals; it produces relatively little of the industrial metals copper, lead, and zinc, but according to one estimate has as a percent of world reserves 40% of gold, 60% of cobalt, and 90% of the world's platinum group metals.[57] Mining in India is a significant part of that country's economy. In the developed world, mining in Australia, with BHP Billiton founded and headquartered in the country, and mining in Canada are particularly significant. For rare earth minerals mining, China reportedly controlled 95% of production in 2013.[58]
+While exploration and mining can be conducted by individual entrepreneurs or small businesses, most modern-day mines are large enterprises requiring large amounts of capital to establish. Consequently, the mining sector of the industry is dominated by large, often multinational, companies, most of them publicly listed. It can be argued that what is referred to as the 'mining industry' is actually two sectors, one specializing in exploration for new resources and the other in mining those resources. The exploration sector is typically made up of individuals and small mineral resource companies, called "juniors", which are dependent on venture capital. The mining sector is made up of large multinational companies that are sustained by production from their mining operations. Various other industries such as equipment manufacture, environmental testing, and metallurgy analysis rely on, and support, the mining industry throughout the world. Canadian stock exchanges have a particular focus on mining companies, particularly junior exploration companies through Toronto's TSX Venture Exchange; Canadian companies raise capital on these exchanges and then invest the money in exploration globally.[54] Some have argued that below juniors there exists a substantial sector of illegitimate companies primarily focused on manipulating stock prices.[54]
+Mining operations can be grouped into five major categories in terms of their respective resources. These are oil and gas extraction, coal mining, metal ore mining, nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying, and mining support activities.[59] Of all of these categories, oil and gas extraction remains one of the largest in terms of its global economic importance. Prospecting potential mining sites, a vital area of concern for the mining industry, is now done using sophisticated new technologies such as seismic prospecting and remote-sensing satellites. Mining is heavily affected by the prices of the commodity minerals, which are often volatile. The 2000s commodities boom ("commodities supercycle") increased the prices of commodities, driving aggressive mining. In addition, the price of gold increased dramatically in the 2000s, which increased gold mining; for example, one study found that conversion of forest in the Amazon increased six-fold from the period 2003–2006 (292 ha/yr) to the period 2006–2009 (1,915 ha/yr), largely due to artisanal mining.[60]
+Mining companies can be classified based on their size and financial capabilities:
+New regulations and a process of legislative reforms aim to improve the harmonization and stability of the mining sector in mineral-rich countries.[62] New legislation for mining industry in African countries still appears to be an issue, but has the potential to be solved, when a consensus is reached on the best approach.[63] By the beginning of the 21st century the booming and increasingly complex mining sector in mineral-rich countries was providing only slight benefits to local communities, especially in given the sustainability issues. Increasing debate and influence by NGOs and local communities called for a new approaches which would also include disadvantaged communities, and work towards sustainable development even after mine closure (including transparency and revenue management). By the early 2000s, community development issues and resettlements became mainstream concerns in World Bank mining projects.[63] Mining-industry expansion after mineral prices increased in 2003 and also potential fiscal revenues in those countries created an omission in the other economic sectors in terms of finances and development. Furthermore, this highlighted regional and local demand for mining revenues and an inability of sub-national governments to effectively use the revenues. The Fraser Institute (a Canadian think tank) has highlighted[clarification needed] the environmental protection laws in developing countries, as well as voluntary efforts by mining companies to improve their environmental impact.[64]
+In 2007 the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was mainstreamed[clarification needed] in all countries cooperating with the World Bank in mining industry reform.[63] The EITI operates and was implemented with the support of the EITI multi-donor trust fund, managed by the World Bank.[65] The EITI aims to increase transparency in transactions between governments and companies in extractive industries[66] by monitoring the revenues and benefits between industries and recipient governments. The entrance process is voluntary for each country and is monitored by multiple stakeholders including governments, private companies and civil society representatives, responsible for disclosure and dissemination of the reconciliation report;[63] however, the competitive disadvantage of company-by company public report is for some of the businesses in Ghana at least, the main constraint.[67] Therefore, the outcome assessment in terms of failure or success of the new EITI regulation does not only "rest on the government's shoulders" but also on civil society and companies.[68]
+On the other hand, implementation has issues; inclusion or exclusion of artisanal mining and small-scale mining (ASM) from the EITI and how to deal with "non-cash" payments made by companies to subnational governments. Furthermore, the disproportionate revenues the mining industry can bring to the comparatively small number of people that it employs,[69] causes other problems, like a lack of investment in other less lucrative sectors, leading to swings in government revenuebecause of volatility in the oil markets. Artisanal mining is clearly an issue in EITI Countries such as the Central African Republic, D.R. Congo, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – i.e. almost half of the mining countries implementing the EITI.[69] Among other things, limited scope of the EITI involving disparity in terms of knowledge of the industry and negotiation skills, thus far flexibility of the policy (e.g. liberty of the countries to expand beyond the minimum requirements and adapt it to their needs), creates another risk of unsuccessful implementation. Public awareness increase, where government should act as a bridge between public and initiative for a successful outcome of the policy is an important element to be considered.[70]
+The World Bank has been involved in mining since 1955, mainly through grants from its International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with the Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency offering political risk insurance.[71] Between 1955 and 1990 it provided about $2 billion to fifty mining projects, broadly categorized as reform and rehabilitation, greenfield mine construction, mineral processing, technical assistance, and engineering. These projects have been criticized, particularly the Ferro Carajas project of Brazil, begun in 1981.[72] The World Bank established mining codes intended to increase foreign investment; in 1988 it solicited feedback from 45 mining companies on how to increase their involvement.[42]:20
+In 1992 the World Bank began to push for privatization of government-owned mining companies with a new set of codes, beginning with its report The Strategy for African Mining. In 1997, Latin America's largest miner Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) was privatized. These and other developments such as the Philippines 1995 Mining Act led the bank to publish a third report (Assistance for Minerals Sector Development and Reform in Member Countries) which endorsed mandatory environment impact assessments and attention to the concerns of the local population. The codes based on this report are influential in the legislation of developing nations. The new codes are intended to encourage development through tax holidays, zero custom duties, reduced income taxes, and related measures.[42]:22 The results of these codes were analyzed by a group from the University of Quebec, which concluded that the codes promote foreign investment but "fall very short of permitting sustainable development".[73] The observed negative correlation between natural resources and economic development is known as the resource curse.
+Safety has long been a concern in the mining business, especially in sub-surface mining. The Courrières mine disaster, Europe's worst mining accident, involved the death of 1,099 miners in Northern France on March 10, 1906. This disaster was surpassed only by the Benxihu Colliery accident in China on April 26, 1942, which killed 1,549 miners.[74] While mining today is substantially safer than it was in previous decades, mining accidents still occur. Government figures indicate that 5,000 Chinese miners die in accidents each year, while other reports have suggested a figure as high as 20,000.[75] Mining accidents continue worldwide, including accidents causing dozens of fatalities at a time such as the 2007 Ulyanovskaya Mine disaster in Russia, the 2009 Heilongjiang mine explosion in China, and the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in the United States. Mining has been identified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) as a priority industry sector in the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) to identify and provide intervention strategies regarding occupational health and safety issues.[76] The Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) was established in 1978 to "work to prevent death, illness, and injury from mining and promote safe and healthful workplaces for US miners."[77] Since its implementation in 1978, the number of miner fatalities has decreased from 242 miners in 1978 to 24 miners in 2019.
+There are numerous occupational hazards associated with mining, including exposure to rockdust which can lead to diseases such as silicosis, asbestosis, and pneumoconiosis. Gases in the mine can lead to asphyxiation and could also be ignited. Mining equipment can generate considerable noise, putting workers at risk for hearing loss. Cave-ins, rock falls, and exposure to excess heat are also known hazards. The current NIOSH Recommended Exposure Limit (REL) of noise is 85 dBA with a 3 dBA exchange rate and the MSHA Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) is 90 dBA with a 5 dBA exchange rate as an 8-hour time-weighted average. NIOSH has found that 25% of noise-exposed workers in Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction have hearing impairment.[78] The prevalence of hearing loss increased by 1% from 1991-2001 within these workers.
+Noise studies have been conducted in several mining environments. Stageloaders (84-102 dBA), shearers (85-99 dBA), auxiliary fans (84–120 dBA), continuous mining machines (78–109 dBA), and roof bolters (92–103 dBA) represent some of the noisiest equipment in underground coal mines.[79] Dragline oilers, dozer operators, and welders using air arcing were occupations with the highest noise exposures among surface coal miners.[80] Coal mines had the highest hearing loss injury likelihood.[81]
+Proper ventilation, hearing protection, and spraying equipment with water are important safety practices in mines.
+As of 2008, the deepest mine in the world is TauTona in Carletonville, South Africa, at 3.9 kilometres (2.4 mi),[82] replacing the neighboring Savuka Mine in the North West Province of South Africa at 3,774 metres (12,382 ft).[83] East Rand Mine in Boksburg, South Africa briefly held the record at 3,585 metres (11,762 ft), and the first mine declared the deepest in the world was also TauTona when it was at 3,581 metres (11,749 ft).
+The Moab Khutsong gold mine in North West Province (South Africa) has the world's longest winding steel wire rope, which is able to lower workers to 3,054 metres (10,020 ft) in one uninterrupted four-minute journey.[84]
+The deepest mine in Europe is the 16th shaft of the uranium mines in Příbram, Czech Republic, at 1,838 metres (6,030 ft),[85] second is Bergwerk Saar in Saarland, Germany, at 1,750 metres (5,740 ft).
+The deepest open-pit mine in the world is Bingham Canyon Mine in Bingham Canyon, Utah, United States, at over 1,200 metres (3,900 ft). The largest and second deepest open-pit copper mine in the world is Chuquicamata in northern Chile at 900 metres (3,000 ft), which annually produces 443,000 tons of copper and 20,000 tons of molybdenum.[86][87][88]
+The deepest open-pit mine with respect to sea level is Tagebau Hambach in Germany, where the base of the pit is 293 metres (961 ft) below sea level.
+The largest underground mine is Kiirunavaara Mine in Kiruna, Sweden. With 450 kilometres (280 mi) of roads, 40 million tonnes of annually produced ore, and a depth of 1,270 metres (4,170 ft), it is also one of the most modern underground mines. The deepest borehole in the world is Kola Superdeep Borehole at 12,262 metres (40,230 ft), but this is connected to scientific drilling, not mining.
+During the 20th century, the variety of metals used in society grew rapidly. Today, the development of major nations such as China and India and advances in technologies are fueling an ever-greater demand. The result is that metal mining activities are expanding and more and more of the world's metal stocks are above ground in use rather than below ground as unused reserves. An example is the in-use stock of copper. Between 1932 and 1999, copper in use in the US rose from 73 kilograms (161 lb) to 238 kilograms (525 lb) per person.[89]
+95% of the energy used to make aluminium from bauxite ore is saved by using recycled material.[90] However, levels of metals recycling are generally low. In 2010, the International Resource Panel, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), published reports on metal stocks that exist within society[91] and their recycling rates.[89]
+The report's authors observed that the metal stocks in society can serve as huge mines above ground. However, they warned that the recycling rates of some rare metals used in applications such as mobile phones, battery packs for hybrid cars, and fuel cells are so low that unless future end-of-life recycling rates are dramatically stepped up these critical metals will become unavailable for use in modern technology.
+As recycling rates are low and so much metal has already been extracted, some landfills now contain a higher concentrations of metal than mines themselves.[92] This is especially true of aluminium, used in cans, and precious metals, found in discarded electronics.[93] Furthermore, waste after 15 years has still not broken down, so less processing would be required when compared to mining ores. A study undertaken by Cranfield University has found £360 million of metals could be mined from just 4 landfill sites.[94] There is also up to 20MJ/kg of energy in waste, potentially making the re-extraction more profitable.[95] However, although the first landfill mine opened in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1953, little work has followed due to the abundance of accessible ores.[96]

en/2208.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,256 @@

+The Romani (also spelled Romany /ˈroʊməni/, /ˈrɒ-/), colloquially known as Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants living mostly in Europe, and diaspora populations in the Americas. The Romani as a people originate from the northern Indian subcontinent,[61][62][63] from the Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab regions of modern-day India.[62][63]
+Genetic findings appear to confirm that the Romani "came from a single group that left northwestern India" in about 512 CE.[64] Genetic research published in the European Journal of Human Genetics "revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".[65] They are dispersed, but their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe (including Turkey, Spain and Southern France). The Romani arrived in Mid-West Asia and Europe around 1007.[66] They have been associated with another Indo-Aryan group, the Dom people: the two groups have been said to have separated from each other or, at least, to share a similar history.[67] Specifically, the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the 6th and 11th century.[66]
+The Romani are widely known in English by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered by some Roma people to be pejorative due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity.[68] Beginning in 1888, the Gypsy Lore Society[69] started to publish a journal that was meant to dispel rumors about their lifestyle.[70]
+Since the 19th century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States;[6] and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the 19th century from Eastern Europe. Brazil also includes a notable Romani community descended from people deported by the Portuguese Empire during the Portuguese Inquisition.[71] In migrations since the late 19th century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.[72][page needed]
+In February 2016, during the International Roma Conference, the Indian Minister of External Affairs stated that the people of the Roma community were children of India.[73] The conference ended with a recommendation to the government of India to recognize the Roma community spread across 30 countries as a part of the Indian diaspora.[74]
+The Romani language is divided into several dialects which together have an estimated number of speakers of more than two million.[75] The total number of Romani people is at least twice as high (several times as high according to high estimates). Many Romani are native speakers of the dominant language in their country of residence or of mixed languages combining the dominant language with a dialect of Romani; those varieties are sometimes called Para-Romani.[76]
+Perceived as derogatory, many of these exonyms are falling out of standard usage and being replaced by a version of the name Roma.
+Rom means man or husband in the Romani language. It has the variants dom and lom, which may be related to the Sanskrit words dam-pati (lord of the house, husband), dama (to subdue), lom (hair), lomaka (hairy), loman, roman (hairy), romaça (man with beard and long hair).[86] Another possible origin is from Sanskrit डोम doma (member of a low caste of travelling musicians and dancers).
+In the Romani language, Rom is a masculine noun, meaning 'man of the Roma ethnic group' or 'man, husband', with the plural Roma. The feminine of Rom in the Romani language is Romni. However, in most cases, in other languages Rom is now used for people of both genders.[87]
+Romani is the feminine adjective, while Romano is the masculine adjective. Some Romanies use Rom or Roma as an ethnic name, while others (such as the Sinti, or the Romanichal) do not use this term as a self-ascription for the entire ethnic group.[88]
+Sometimes, rom and romani are spelled with a double r, i.e., rrom and rromani. In this case rr is used to represent the phoneme /ʀ/ (also written as ř and rh), which in some Romani dialects has remained different from the one written with a single r. The rr spelling is common in certain institutions (such as the INALCO Institute in Paris), or used in certain countries, e.g., Romania, to distinguish from the endonym/homonym for Romanians (sg. român, pl. români).[89]
+In the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary), Rom is a noun (with the plural Roma or Roms) and an adjective, while Romani (Romany) is also a noun (with the plural Romani, the Romani, Romanies, or Romanis) and an adjective.  Both Rom and Romani have been in use in English since the 19th century as an alternative for Gypsy.[90] Romani was sometimes spelled Rommany, but more often Romany, while today Romani is the most popular spelling.  Occasionally, the double r spelling (e.g., Rroma, Rromani) mentioned above is also encountered in English texts.
+The term Roma is increasingly encountered,[91][92] as a generic term for the Romani people.[93][94][95]
+Because all Romanis use the word Romani as an adjective, the term became a noun for the entire ethnic group.[96] Today, the term Romani is used by some organizations, including the United Nations and the US Library of Congress.[89] However, the Council of Europe and other organizations consider that Roma is the correct term referring to all related groups, regardless of their country of origin, and recommend that Romani be restricted to the language and culture: Romani language, Romani culture.[87]
+The standard assumption is that the demonyms of the Romani people, Lom and Dom share the same origin.[97][98]
+The English term Gypsy (or Gipsy) originates from the Middle English gypcian, short for Egipcien. The Spanish term Gitano and French Gitan have similar etymologies. They are ultimately derived from the Greek Αιγύπτιοι (Aigyptioi), meaning Egyptian, via Latin. This designation owes its existence to the belief, common in the Middle Ages, that the Romani, or some related group (such as the Middle Eastern Dom people), were itinerant Egyptians.[99][100] This belief appears to derive from verses in the biblical Book of Ezekiel (29: 6 and 12-13) referring to the Egyptians being scattered among the nations by an angry God. According to one narrative, they were exiled from Egypt as punishment for allegedly harbouring the infant Jesus.[101] In his book 'The Zincali: an account of the Gypsies of Spain', George Borrow notes that when they first appeared in Germany it was under the character of Egyptians doing penance for their having refused hospitality to the Virgin and her son. As described in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the medieval French referred to the Romanies as Egyptiens.
+This exonym is sometimes written with capital letter, to show that it designates an ethnic group.[102] However, the word is considered derogatory because of its negative and stereotypical associations.[94][103][104][105] The Council of Europe consider that "Gypsy" or equivalent terms, as well as administrative terms such as "Gens du Voyage" (referring in fact to an ethnic group but not acknowledging ethnic identification) are not in line with European recommendations.[87] In North America, the word Gypsy is most commonly used as a reference to Romani ethnicity, though lifestyle and fashion are at times also referenced by using this word.[106]
+Another common designation of the Romani people is Cingane (alt. Tsinganoi, Zigar, Zigeuner), which likely derives from Athinganoi, the name of a Christian sect with whom the Romani (or some related group) became associated in the Middle Ages.[100][107][108][109]
+For a variety of reasons, many Romanis choose not to register their ethnic identity in official censuses. There are an estimated 10 million Romani people in Europe (as of 2019),[110] although some high estimates by Romani organizations give numbers as high as 14 million.[111] Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkans, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine. In the European Union there are an estimated 6 million Romanis.[112]  Several million more Romanis may live outside Europe, in particular in the Middle East and in the Americas.[113]
+Like the Roma in general, many different ethnonyms are given to subgroups of Roma. Sometimes a subgroup uses more than one endonym, is commonly known by an exonym or erroneously by the endonym of another subgroup. The only name approaching an all-encompassing self-description is Rom.[114] Even when subgroups don't use the name, they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy between themselves and Gadjo (non-Roma).[114] For instance, while the main group of Roma in German-speaking countries refer to themselves as Sinti, their name for their original language is Romanes.
+Subgroups have been described as, in part, a result of the Hindu caste system, which the founding population of Rom almost certainly experienced in their South Asian urheimat.[114][115]
+Many groups use names apparently derived from the Romani word kalo or calo, meaning "black" or "absorbing all light".[116] This closely resembles words for "black" or "dark" in Indo-Aryan languages (e.g., Sanskrit काल kāla: "black", "of a dark colour").[114] Likewise, the name of the Dom or Domba people of North India – to whom the Roma have genetic,[117] cultural and linguistic links – has come to imply "dark-skinned", in some Indian languages.[118] Hence names such as kale and calé may have originated as an exonym or a euphemism for Roma.
+Other endonyms for Romani include, for example:
+The Roma people have a number of distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Iberian Calé or Caló, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century, from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier.[132][64] They settled in present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Romani population in the United States is estimated at more than one million.[133] Brazil has the second largest Romani population in the Americas, estimated at approximately 800,000 by the 2011 census. The Romani people are mainly called by non-Romani ethnic Brazilians as ciganos. Most of them belong to the ethnic subgroup Calés (Kale), of the Iberian peninsula. Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazilian president during 1956–1961 term, was 50% Czech Romani by his mother's bloodline; and Washington Luís, last president of the First Brazilian Republic (1926–1930 term), had Portuguese Kale ancestry.
+There is no official or reliable count of the Romani populations worldwide.[134] Many Romani refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination.[135][better source needed] Others are descendants of intermarriage with local populations and no longer identify only as Romani, or not at all.
+As of the early 2000s, an estimated 3.8[136][page needed] to 9 million Romani people lived in Europe and Asia Minor.[137][page needed] although some Romani organizations estimate numbers as high as 14 million.[138]  Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkan peninsula, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia, and Ukraine. The total number of Romani living outside Europe are primarily in the Middle East and North Africa and in the Americas, and are estimated in total at more than two million. Some countries do not collect data by ethnicity.
+The Romani people identify as distinct ethnicities based in part on territorial, cultural and dialectal differences, and self-designation.[139][140][141][142]
+Genetic findings suggest an Indian origin for Roma.[132][64][143] Because Romani groups did not keep chronicles of their history or have oral accounts of it, most hypotheses about the Romani's migration early history are based on linguistic theory.[144] There is also no known record of a migration from India to Europe from medieval times that can be connected indisputably to Roma.[145]
+According to a legend reported in the Persian epic poem, the Shahnameh, from Iran and repeated by several modern authors, the Sasanian king Bahrām V Gōr learned towards the end of his reign (421–39) that the poor could not afford to enjoy music, and he asked the king of India to send him ten thousand luris, lute-playing experts.  When the luris arrived, Bahrām gave each one an ox, a donkey, and a donkey-load of wheat so that they could live on agriculture and play music for free for the poor. But the luris ate the oxen and the wheat and came back a year later with their cheeks hollowed with hunger. The king, angered with their having wasted what he had given them, ordered them to pack up their bags and go wandering around the world on their donkeys.[146]
+The linguistic evidence has indisputably shown that the roots of the Romani language lie in India: the language has grammatical characteristics of Indian languages and shares with them a large part of the basic lexicon, for example, regarding body parts or daily routines.[147]
+More exactly, Romani shares the basic lexicon with Hindi and Punjabi. It shares many phonetic features with Marwari, while its grammar is closest to Bengali.[148]
+Romani and Domari share some similarities: agglutination of postpositions of the second Layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, concord markers for the past tense, the neutralisation of gender marking in the plural, and the use of the oblique case as an accusative.[149] This has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages. Domari was once thought to be a "sister language" of Romani, the two languages having split after the departure from the Indian subcontinent –  but later research suggests that the differences between them are significant enough to treat them as two separate languages within the Central zone (Hindustani) group of languages. The Dom and the Rom therefore likely descend from two different migration waves out of India, separated by several centuries.[67][150]
+In phonology, Romani language shares several isoglosses with the Central branch of Indo-Aryan languages especially in the realization of some sounds of the Old Indo-Aryan. However, it also preserves several dental clusters. In regards to verb morphology, Romani follows exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers, lending credence to the theory of their Central Indian origin and a subsequent migration to northwestern India. Though the retention of dental clusters suggests a break from central languages during the transition from Old to Middle Indo-Aryan, the overall morphology suggests that the language participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages.[151]
+Numerals in the Romani, Domari and Lomavren languages, with Sanskrit, Hindi and Persian forms for comparison.[152] Note that Romani 7–9 are borrowed from Greek.
+Genetic findings in 2012 suggest the Romani originated in northwestern India and migrated as a group.[132][64][153] According to the study, the ancestors of present scheduled castes and scheduled tribes populations of northern India, traditionally referred to collectively as the Ḍoma, are the likely ancestral populations of modern European Roma.[154] In December 2012, additional findings appeared to confirm the "Roma came from a single group that left northwestern India about 1,500 years ago".[64] They reached the Balkans about 900 years ago[132] and then spread throughout Europe. The team also found the Roma to display genetic isolation, as well as "differential gene flow in time and space with non-Romani Europeans".[132][64]
+Genetic research published in European Journal of Human Genetics "has revealed that over 70% of males belong to a single lineage that appears unique to the Roma".[65]
+Genetic evidence supports the medieval migration from India. The Romani have been described as "a conglomerate of genetically isolated founder populations",[155] while a number of common Mendelian disorders among Romanies from all over Europe indicates "a common origin and founder effect".[155][156]
+A study from 2001 by Gresham et al. suggests "a limited number of related founders, compatible with a small group of migrants splitting from a distinct caste or tribal group".[157] The same study found that "a single lineage... found across Romani populations, accounts for almost one-third of Romani males".[157] A 2004 study by Morar et al. concluded that the Romani population "was founded approximately 32–40 generations ago, with secondary and tertiary founder events occurring approximately 16–25 generations ago".[158]
+Haplogroup H-M82 is a major lineage cluster in the Balkan Romani group, accounting for approximately 60% of the total.[159] Haplogroup H is uncommon in Europe but present in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka.
+A study of 444 people representing three different ethnic groups in North Macedonia found mtDNA haplogroups M5a1 and H7a1a were dominant in Romanies (13.7% and 10.3%, respectively).[160]
+Y-DNA composition of Romani in North Macedonia, based on 57 samples:[161]
+Y-DNA Haplogroup H1a occurs in Romani at frequencies 7–70%. Unlike ethnic Hungarians, among Hungarian and Slovakian Romani subpopulations, Haplogroup E-M78 and I1 usually occur above 10% and sometimes over 20%.  While among Slovakian and Tiszavasvari Romani the dominant haplogroup is H1a, among Tokaj Romani is Haplogroup J2a (23%), while among Taktaharkány Romani is Haplogroup I2a (21%).[162] Five, rather consistent founder lineages throughout the subpopulations, were found among Romani – J-M67 and J-M92 (J2), H-M52 (H1a1), and I-P259 (I1?). Haplogroup I-P259 as H is not found at frequencies of over 3 percent among host populations, while haplogroups E and I are absent in South Asia. The lineages E-V13, I-P37 (I2a) and R-M17 (R1a) may represent gene flow from the host populations. Bulgarian, Romanian and Greek Romani are dominated by Haplogroup H-M82 (H1a1), while among Spanish Romani J2 is prevalent.[163] In Serbia among Kosovo[a] and Belgrade Romani Haplogroup H prevails, while among Vojvodina Romani, H drops to 7 percent and E-V13 rises to a prevailing level.[164]
+Among non-Roma Europeans Haplogroup H is extremely rare, peaking at 7 percent among Albanians from Tirana[165] and 11 percent among Bulgarian Turks. It occurs at 5 percent among Hungarians,[162] although the carriers might be of Romani origin.[163] Among non Roma-speaking Europeans at 2 percent among Slovaks,[166] 2 percent among Croats,[167] 1 percent among Macedonians from Skopje, 3 percent among Macedonian Albanians,[168] 1 percent among Serbs from Belgrade,[169] 3 percent among Bulgarians from Sofia,[170] 1 percent among Austrians and Swiss,[171] 3 percent among Romanians from Ploiesti, 1 percent among Turks.[166]
+They may have emerged from the modern Indian state of Rajasthan,[172] migrating to the northwest (the Punjab region, Sindh and Baluchistan of the Indian subcontinent) around 250 BC. Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed to have occurred beginning in about CE 500.[64]
+It has also been suggested that emigration from India may have taken place in the context of the raids by Mahmud of Ghazni. As these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire.[173] The author Ralph Lilley Turner theorised a central Indian origin of Romani followed by a migration to Northwest India as it shares a number of ancient isoglosses with Central Indo-Aryan languages in relation to realization of some sounds of Old Indo-Aryan. This is lent further credence by its sharing exactly the same pattern of northwestern languages such as Kashmiri and Shina through the adoption of oblique enclitic pronouns as person markers. The overall morphology suggests that Romani participated in some of the significant developments leading toward the emergence of New Indo-Aryan languages, thus indicating that the proto-Romani did not leave the Indian subcontinent until late in the second half of the first millennium.[151][174]
+Though according to a 2012 genomic study, the Romani reached the Balkans as early as the 12th century,[175] the first historical records of the Romani reaching south-eastern Europe are from the 14th century: in 1322, after leaving Ireland on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Irish Franciscan friar Symon Semeonis encountered a migrant group of Romani outside the town of Candia (modern Heraklion), in Crete, calling them "the descendants of Cain"; his account is the earliest surviving description by a Western chronicler of the Romani in Europe.
+In 1350, Ludolph of Saxony mentioned a similar people with a unique language whom he called Mandapolos, a word some think derives from the Greek word mantes (meaning prophet or fortune teller).[176]
+Around 1360, a fiefdom called the Feudum Acinganorum was established in Corfu, which mainly used Romani serfs and to which the Romani on the island were subservient.[177]
+By the 1440s, they were recorded in Germany;[178] and by the 16th century, Scotland and Sweden.[179] Some Romani migrated from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century. The two currents met in France.[180]
+Their early history shows a mixed reception. Although 1385 marks the first recorded transaction for a Romani slave in Wallachia, they were issued safe conduct by Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1417. Romanies were ordered expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, Lucerne in 1471, Milan in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, England in 1530 (see Egyptians Act 1530), and Denmark in 1536. In 1510, any Romani found in Switzerland were ordered put to death, with similar rules established in England in 1554, and Denmark in 1589, whereas Portugal began deportations of Romanies to its colonies in 1538.[182]
+A 1596 English statute gave Romanis special privileges that other wanderers lacked. France passed a similar law in 1683. Catherine the Great of Russia declared the Romanies "crown slaves" (a status superior to serfs), but also kept them out of certain parts of the capital.[183] In 1595, Ștefan Răzvan overcame his birth into slavery, and became the Voivode (Prince) of Moldavia.[182]
+Since a royal edict by Charles II in 1695, Spanish Romanis had been restricted to certain towns.[184] An official edict in 1717 restricted them to only 75 towns and districts, so that they would not be concentrated in any one region. In the Great Gypsy Round-up, Romani were arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish Monarchy in 1749.
+During the latter part of the 17th century, around the Franco-Dutch War, both France and Holland needed thousands of men to fight. Some recruitment took the form of rounding up vagrants and the poor to work the galleys and provide the armies' labour force. With this background, Romanis were targets of both the French and the Dutch.
+After the wars, and into the first decade of the 18th century, Romanis were slaughtered with impunity throughout Holland. Romanis, called ‘heiden’ by the Dutch, wandered throughout the rural areas of Europe and became the societal pariahs of the age. Heidenjachten, translated as "heathen hunt" happened throughout Holland in an attempt to eradicate them.[185]
+Although some Romani could be kept as slaves in Wallachia and Moldavia until abolition in 1856, the majority traveled as free nomads with their wagons, as alluded to in the spoked wheel symbol in the Romani flag.[186] Elsewhere in Europe, they were subjected to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labour. In England, Romani were sometimes expelled from small communities or hanged; in France, they were branded, and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed. As a result, large groups of the Romani moved to the East, toward Poland, which was more tolerant, and Russia, where the Romani were treated more fairly as long as they paid the annual taxes.[187]
+Romani began emigrating to North America in colonial times, with small groups recorded in Virginia and French Louisiana. Larger-scale Roma emigration to the United States began in the 1860s, with Romanichal groups from Great Britain. The most significant number immigrated in the early 20th century, mainly from the Vlax group of Kalderash. Many Romani also settled in South America.
+During World War II, the Nazis embarked on a systematic genocide of the Romani, a process known in Romani as the Porajmos.[188] Romanies were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads) on the Eastern Front.[189] The total number of victims has been variously estimated at between 220,000 and 1,500,000.[190]
+The treatment of the Romani in Nazi puppet states differed markedly. In the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaša killed almost the entire Roma population of 25,000. The concentration camp system of Jasenovac, run by the Ustaša militia and the Croat political police, were responsible for the deaths of between 15,000 and 20,000 Roma.[191]
+In Czechoslovakia, they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum", and Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. This policy was implemented with large financial incentives, threats of denying future welfare payments, with misinformation, or after administering drugs.[192][193]
+An official inquiry from the Czech Republic, resulting in a report (December 2005), concluded that the Communist authorities had practised an assimilation policy towards Romanis, which "included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community. The problem of sexual sterilisation carried out in the Czech Republic, either with improper motivation or illegally, exists," said the Czech Public Defender of Rights, recommending state compensation for women affected between 1973 and 1991.[194] New cases were revealed up until 2004, in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland "all have histories of coercive sterilization of minorities and other groups".[195]
+The traditional Romanies place a high value on the extended family. Virginity is essential in unmarried women. Both men and women often marry young; there has been controversy in several countries over the Romani practise of child marriage. Romani law establishes that the man's family must pay a bride price to the bride's parents, but only traditional families still follow it.
+Once married, the woman joins the husband's family, where her main job is to tend to her husband's and her children's needs and take care of her in-laws. The power structure in the traditional Romani household has at its top the oldest man or grandfather, and men, in general, have more authority than women. Women gain respect and power as they get older. Young wives begin gaining authority once they have children.
+Romani social behavior is strictly regulated by Hindu purity laws[196] ("marime" or "marhime"), still respected by most Roma (and by most older generations of Sinti). This regulation affects many aspects of life and is applied to actions, people and things: parts of the human body are considered impure: the genital organs (because they produce emissions) and the rest of the lower body. Clothes for the lower body, as well as the clothes of menstruating women, are washed separately. Items used for eating are also washed in a different place. Childbirth is considered impure and must occur outside the dwelling place. The mother is deemed to be impure for forty days after giving birth.
+Death is considered impure, and affects the whole family of the dead, who remain impure for a period of time. In contrast to the practice of cremating the dead, Romani dead must be buried.[197] Cremation and burial are both known from the time of the Rigveda, and both are widely practiced in Hinduism today (although the tendency is for Hindus to practice cremation, while some communities in South India tend to bury their dead).[198] Some animals are also considered impure, for instance, cats, because they lick their hindquarters. Horses, in contrast, are not considered impure because they cannot do so.[199]
+In Romani philosophy, Romanipen (also romanypen, romanipe, romanype, romanimos, romaimos, romaniya) is the totality of the Romani spirit, Romani culture, Romani Law,  being a Romani, a set of Romani strains.
+An ethnic Romani is considered a gadjo in the Romani society if he has no Romanipen. Sometimes a non-Romani may be considered a Romani if he has Romanipen. Usually this is an adopted child. It has been hypothesized that it owes more to a framework of culture rather than simply an adherence to historically received rules.[200]
+Most Romani people are Christian,[201] others Muslim; some retained their ancient faith of Hinduism from their original homeland of India, while others have their own religion and political organization.[202]
+The ancestors of modern-day Romani people were Hindu, but adopted Christianity or Islam depending on the regions through which they had migrated.[203] Muslim Roma are found in Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Egypt, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria, forming a very significant proportion of the Romani people. In neighboring countries such as Serbia and Greece, most Romani inhabitants follow the practice of Orthodoxy. It is likely that the adherence to differing religions prevented families from engaging in intermarriage.[204]
+In Spain, most Gitanos are Roman Catholics.[citation needed]
+Some brotherhoods have organized Gitanos in their Holy Week devotions.
+They are popularly known as Cofradía de los Gitanos.
+However, the proportion of followers of Evangelical Christianity among Gitanos is higher than among the rest of Spaniards.[citation needed]
+Their version of el culto integrates Flamenco music.
+Blessed Ceferino Giménez Malla is recently considered a patron saint of the Romani people in Roman Catholicism.[205] Saint Sarah, or Sara e Kali, has also been venerated as a patron saint in her shrine at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France. Since the turn of the 21st century, Sara e Kali is understood to have been Kali, an Indian deity brought from India by the refugee ancestors of the Roma people; as the Roma became Christianized, she was absorbed in a syncretic way and venerated as a saint.[206]
+Saint Sarah is now increasingly being considered as "a Romani Goddess, the Protectress of the Roma" and an "indisputable link with Mother India".[206][207]
+Romanies often adopt the dominant religion of their host country in the event that a ceremony associated with a formal religious institution is necessary, such as a baptism or funeral (their particular belief systems and indigenous religion and worship remain preserved regardless of such adoption processes). The Roma continue to practice "Shaktism", a practice with origins in India, whereby a female consort is required for the worship of a god. Adherence to this practice means that for the Roma who worship the Christian God, prayer is conducted through the Virgin Mary, or her mother, Saint Anne. Shaktism continues over one thousand years after the people's separation from India.[208]
+Besides the Roma elders (who serve as spiritual leaders), priests, churches, or bibles do not exist among the Romanies –  the only exception is the Pentecostal Roma.[208]
+For the Roma communities that have resided in the Balkans for numerous centuries, often referred to as "Turkish Gypsies", the following histories apply for religious beliefs:
+In Ukraine and Russia, the Roma populations are also Muslim as the families of Balkan migrants continue to live in these locations. Their ancestors settled on the Crimean peninsula during the 17th and 18th centuries, but then migrated to Ukraine, southern Russia and the Povolzhie (along the Volga River). Formally, Islam is the religion that these communities align themselves with and the people are recognized for their staunch preservation of the Romani language and identity.[210]
+In Poland and Slovakia, their populations are Roman Catholic, many times adopting and following local, cultural Catholicism as a syncretic system of belief that incorporates distinct Roma beliefs and cultural aspects. For example, many Polish Roma delays their Church wedding due to the belief that sacramental marriage is accompanied by divine ratification, creating a virtually indissoluble union until the couple consummate, after which the sacramental marriage is dissoluble only by the death of a spouse. Therefore, for Polish Roma, once married, one can't ever divorce. Another aspect of Polish Roma's Catholicism is a tradition of pilgrimage to the Jasna Góra Monastery.[212]
+Most Eastern European Romanies are Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Muslim.[213] Those in Western Europe and the United States are mostly Roman Catholic or Protestant –  in southern Spain, many Romanies are Pentecostal, but this is a small minority that has emerged in contemporary times.[208] In Egypt, the Romanies are split into Christian and Muslim populations.[214]
+Romani music plays an important role in Central and Eastern European countries such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, and the style and performance practices of Romani musicians have influenced European classical composers such as Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The lăutari who perform at traditional Romanian weddings are virtually all Romani.[citation needed]
+Probably the most internationally prominent contemporary performers[citation needed] in the lăutari tradition are Taraful Haiducilor. Bulgaria's popular "wedding music", too, is almost exclusively performed by Romani musicians such as Ivo Papasov, a virtuoso clarinetist closely associated with this genre and Bulgarian pop-folk singer Azis.
+Many famous classical musicians, such as the Hungarian pianist Georges Cziffra, are Romani, as are many prominent performers of manele. Zdob și Zdub, one of the most prominent rock bands in Moldova, although not Romanies themselves, draw heavily on Romani music, as do Spitalul de Urgență in Romania, Shantel in Germany, Goran Bregović in Serbia, Darko Rundek in Croatia, Beirut and Gogol Bordello in the United States.
+Another tradition of Romani music is the genre of the Romani brass band, with such notable practitioners as Boban Marković of Serbia, and the brass lăutari groups Fanfare Ciocărlia and Fanfare din Cozmesti of Romania.
+Dances such as the flamenco of Spain and Oriental dances of Egypt are said to have originated from the Romani.[215]
+The distinctive sound of Romani music has also strongly influenced bolero, jazz, and flamenco (especially cante jondo) in Spain. European-style gypsy jazz ("jazz Manouche" or "Sinti jazz") is still widely practiced among the original creators (the Romanie People); one who acknowledged this artistic debt was guitarist Django Reinhardt. Contemporary artists in this tradition known internationally include Stochelo Rosenberg, Biréli Lagrène, Jimmy Rosenberg, Paulus Schäfer and Tchavolo Schmitt.
+The Romanies of Turkey have achieved musical acclaim from national and local audiences. Local performers usually perform for special holidays. Their music is usually performed on instruments such as the darbuka, gırnata and cümbüş.[216]
+Romani contemporary art is art created by Romani people. It emerged at the climax of the process that began in Central and Eastern Europe in the late-1980s, when the interpretation of the cultural practice of minorities was enabled by a paradigm shift, commonly referred to in specialist literature as the Cultural turn. The idea of the "cultural turn" was introduced; and this was also the time when the notion of cultural democracy became crystallized in the debates carried on at various public forums. Civil society gained strength, and civil politics appeared, which is a prerequisite for cultural democracy. This shift of attitude in scholarly circles derived from concerns specific not only to ethnicity, but also to society, gender and class.[217]
+Most Romani speak one of several dialects of the Romani language,[218] an Indo-Aryan language, with roots in Sanskrit. They also often speak the languages of the countries they live in. Typically, they also incorporate loanwords and calques into Romani from the languages of those countries and especially words for terms that the Romani language does not have. Most of the Ciganos of Portugal, the Gitanos of Spain, the Romanichal of the UK, and Scandinavian Travellers have lost their knowledge of pure Romani, and respectively speak the mixed languages Caló,[219] Angloromany, and Scandoromani. Most of the speaker communities in these regions consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe.[220]
+There are no concrete statistics for the number of Romani speakers, both in Europe and globally. However, a conservative estimation has been made at 3.5 million speakers in Europe and a further 500,000 elsewhere,[220] although the actual number may be considerably higher. This makes Romani the second largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan.[220]
+In relation to dialect diversity, Romani works in the same way as most other European languages.[221] Cross-dialect communication is dominated by the following features:
+One of the most enduring persecutions against the Romani people was their enslavement. Slavery was widely practiced in medieval Europe, including the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the 13th–14th century.[222][page needed] Legislation decreed that all the Romani living in these states, as well as any others who immigrated there, were classified as slaves.[223] Slavery was gradually abolished during the 1840s and 1850s.[224][page needed]
+The exact origins of slavery in the Danubian Principalities are not known. There is some debate over whether the Romani people came to Wallachia and Moldavia as free men or were brought as slaves. Historian Nicolae Iorga associated the Roma people's arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and considered their slavery as a vestige of that era, in which the Romanians took the Roma as slaves from the Mongols and preserved their status to use their labor. Other historians believe that the Romani were enslaved while captured during the battles with the Tatars. The practice of enslaving war prisoners may also have been adopted from the Mongols.[222][page needed]
+Some Romani may have been slaves or auxiliary troops of the Mongols or Tatars, but most of them migrated from south of the Danube at the end of the 14th century, some time after the foundation of Wallachia. By then, the institution of slavery was already established in Moldavia and possibly in both principalities. After the Roma migrated into the area, slavery became a widespread practice by the majority population. The Tatar slaves, smaller in numbers, were eventually merged into the Roma population.[225]
+Some branches of the Romani people reached Western Europe in the 15th century, fleeing as refugees from the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.[226] Although the Romani were refugees from the conflicts in southeastern Europe, they were often suspected by certain populations in the West of being associated with the Ottoman invasion because their physical appearance seemed Turkish. (The Imperial Diet at Landau and Freiburg in 1496–1498 declared that the Romani were spies of the Turks). In Western Europe, such suspicions and discrimination against a people who were a visible minority resulted in persecution, often violent, with efforts to achieve ethnic cleansing until the modern era. In times of social tension, the Romani suffered as scapegoats; for instance, they were accused of bringing the plague during times of epidemics.[227]
+On 30 July 1749, Spain conducted The Great Roundup of Romani (Gitanos) in its territory. The Spanish Crown ordered a nationwide raid that led to the break-up of families as all able-bodied men were interned into forced labor camps in an attempt at ethnic cleansing. The measure was eventually reversed and the Romanis were freed as protests began to arise in different communities, sedentary romanis being highly esteemed and protected in rural Spain.[228][229]
+Later in the 19th century, Romani immigration was forbidden on a racial basis in areas outside Europe, mostly in the English-speaking world. Argentina in 1880 prohibited immigration by Roma, as did the United States in 1885.[227]
+In the Habsburg Monarchy under Maria Theresa (1740–1780), a series of decrees tried to force the Romanies to permanently settle, removed rights to horse and wagon ownership (1754), renamed them as "New Citizens" and forced Romani boys into military service if they had no trade (1761), forced them to register with the local authorities (1767), and prohibited marriage between Romanies (1773). Her successor Josef II prohibited the wearing of traditional Romani clothing and the use of the Romani language, punishable by flogging.[230]
+In Spain, attempts to assimilate the Gitanos were under way as early as 1619, when Gitanos were forcibly settled, the use of the Romani language was prohibited, Gitano men and women were sent to separate workhouses and their children sent to orphanages. King Charles III took on a more progressive attitude to Gitano assimilation, proclaiming their equal rights as Spanish citizens and ending official denigration based on their race. While he prohibited the nomadic lifestyle, the use of the Calo language, Romani clothing, their trade in horses and other itinerant trades, he also forbade any form of discrimination against them or barring them from the guilds. The use of the word gitano was also forbidden to further assimilation, substituted for "New Castilian", which was also applied to former Jews and Muslims.[231][232]
+Most historians agree that Charles III pragmática failed for three main reasons, ultimately derived from its implementation outside major cities and in marginal areas: The difficulty the Gitano community faced in changing its nomadic lifestyle, the marginal lifestyle in which the community had been driven by society and the serious difficulties of applying the pragmática in the fields of education and work. One author ascribes its failure to the overall rejection by the wider population of the integration of the Gitanos.[230][233]
+Other examples of forced assimilation include Norway, where a law was passed in 1896 permitting the state to remove children from their parents and place them in state institutions.[234] This resulted in some 1,500 Romani children being taken from their parents in the 20th century.[235]
+The persecution of the Romanies reached a peak during World War II in the Porajmos genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany. In 1935, the Nuremberg laws stripped the Romani people living in Nazi Germany of their citizenship, after which they were subjected to violence, imprisonment in concentration camps and later genocide in extermination camps. The policy was extended in areas occupied by the Nazis during the war, and it was also applied by their allies, notably the Independent State of Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.
+Because no accurate pre-war census figures exist for the Romanis, it is impossible to accurately assess the actual number of victims. Most estimates for numbers of Romani victims of the Holocaust fall between 200,000 and 500,000, although figures ranging between 90,000 and 1.5 million have been proposed. Lower estimates do not include those killed in all Axis-controlled countries. A detailed study by Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum gave a figure of at least a minimum of 220,000, possibly closer to 500,000.[236] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, argues in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[237]
+In Central Europe, the extermination in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was so thorough that the Bohemian Romani language became extinct.
+In Europe, Romani people are associated with poverty, and are accused of high rates of crime and behaviours that are perceived by the rest of the population as being antisocial or inappropriate.[239] Partly for this reason, discrimination against the Romani people has continued to the present day,[240][241] although efforts are being made to address them.[242] Amnesty International reports continued instances of Antizigan discrimination during the 20th century, particularly in Romania, Serbia,[243] Slovakia,[244] Hungary,[245] Slovenia,[246] and Kosovo.[247] The European Union has recognized that discrimination against Romani must be addressed, and with the national Roma integration strategy they encourage member states to work towards greater Romani inclusion and upholding the rights of the Romani in the European union.[248]
+In Eastern Europe, Roma children often attend Roma Special Schools, separate from non-Roma children, which puts them at an educational disadvantage.[251]:83
+The Romanis of Kosovo have been severely persecuted by ethnic Albanians since the end of the Kosovo War, and the region's Romani community is, for the most part, annihilated.[252]
+Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Romani women, starting in 1973.[253] The dissidents of the Charter 77 denounced it in 1977–78 as a genocide, but the practice continued through the Velvet Revolution of 1989.[254] A 2005 report by the Czech Republic's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.[255]
+In 2008, following the rape and subsequent murder of an Italian woman in Rome at the hands of a young man from a local Romani encampment,[256] the Italian government declared that Italy's Romani population represented a national security risk and that swift action was required to address the emergenza nomadi (nomad emergency).[257] Specifically, officials in the Italian government accused the Romanies of being responsible for rising crime rates in urban areas.
+The 2008 deaths of Cristina and Violetta Djeordsevic, two Roma children who drowned while Italian beach-goers remained unperturbed, brought international attention to the relationship between Italians and the Roma people. Reviewing the situation in 2012, one Belgian magazine observed:
+On International Roma Day, which falls on 8 April, the significant proportion of Europe's 12 million Roma who live in deplorable conditions will not have much to celebrate. And poverty is not the only worry for the community. Ethnic tensions are on the rise. In 2008, Roma camps came under attack in Italy, intimidation by racist parliamentarians is the norm in Hungary. Speaking in 1993, Václav Havel prophetically remarked that "the treatment of the Roma is a Litmus test for democracy": and democracy has been found wanting. The consequences of the transition to capitalism have been disastrous for the Roma. Under communism they had jobs, free housing and schooling. Now many are unemployed, many are losing their homes and racism is increasingly rewarded with impunity.[258]
+The 2016 Pew Research poll found that Italians, in particular, hold strong anti-Roma views, with 82% of Italians expressing negative opinions about Roma. In Greece 67%, in Hungary 64%, in France 61%, in Spain 49%, in Poland 47%, in the UK 45%, in Sweden 42%, in Germany 40%, and in the Netherlands[259] 37% had an unfavourable view of Roma.[260] The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 83% of Italians, 76% of Slovaks, 72% of Greeks, 68% of Bulgarians, 66% of Czechs, 61% of Lithuanians, 61% of Hungarians, 54% of Ukrainians, 52% of Russians, 51% of Poles, 44% of French, 40% of Spaniards, and 37% of Germans held unfavorable views of Roma.[261]
+Reports of anti-Roma incidents are increasing across Europe.[262] Discrimination against Roma remains widespread in Romania,[263] Slovakia,[264] Bulgaria,[265][266], and the Czech Republic.[267] Roma communities across Ukraine have been the target of violent attacks.[268][269]
+In the summer of 2010, French authorities demolished at least 51 illegal Roma camps and began the process of repatriating their residents to their countries of origin.[270] This followed tensions between the French state and Roma communities, which had been heightened after French police opened fire and killed a traveller who drove through a police checkpoint, hitting an officer, and attempted to hit two more officers at another checkpoint. In retaliation a group of Roma, armed with hatchets and iron bars, attacked the police station of Saint-Aignan, toppled traffic lights and road signs and burned three cars.[271][272] The French government has been accused of perpetrating these actions to pursue its political agenda.[273] EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding stated that the European Commission should take legal action against France over the issue, calling the deportations "a disgrace". A leaked file dated 5 August, sent from the Interior Ministry to regional police chiefs, included the instruction: "Three hundred camps or illegal settlements must be cleared within three months, Roma camps are a priority."[274]
+Many depictions of Romani people in literature and art present romanticized narratives of mystical powers of fortune telling or irascible or passionate temper paired with an indomitable love of freedom and a habit of criminality. Romani were a popular subject in Venetian painting from the time of Giorgione at the start of the 16th century; the inclusion of such a figure adds an exotic oriental flavour to scenes. A Venetian Renaissance painting by Paris Bordone (ca. 1530, Strasbourg) of the Holy Family in Egypt makes Elizabeth, a Romani fortune-teller; the scene is otherwise located in a distinctly European landscape.[275]
+Particularly notable are classics like the story Carmen by Prosper Mérimée and the opera based on it by Georges Bizet, Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Herge's The Castafiore Emerald and Miguel de Cervantes' La Gitanilla. The Romani were also depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Othello and The Tempest, all by William Shakespeare.
+The Romani were also heavily romanticized in the Soviet Union, a classic example being the 1975 film Tabor ukhodit v Nebo.
+A more realistic depiction of contemporary Romani in the Balkans, featuring Romani lay actors speaking in their native dialects, although still playing with established clichés of a Romani penchant for both magic and crime, was presented by Emir Kusturica in his Time of the Gypsies (1988) and Black Cat, White Cat (1998). The films of Tony Gatlif, a French director of Romani ethnicity, like Les Princes (1983), Latcho Drom (1993) and Gadjo Dilo (1997) also portray romani life.
+Paris Bordone, c. 1530, Elizabeth, at right, is shown as a Romani fortune-teller
+August von Pettenkofen: Gypsy Children (1885), Hermitage Museum
+Vincent van Gogh: The Caravans – Gypsy Camp near Arles (1888, oil on canvas)
+Carmen
+Esméralda
+Nicolae Grigorescu Gypsy from Boldu (1897), Art Museum of Iași
+General
+Lists
+European countries Roma links
+Non-governmental organisations
+Museums and libraries

en/2209.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@

+Giuseppe Mazzini (UK: /mætˈsiːni/,[4] US: /mɑːtˈ-, mɑːdˈziːni/,[5][6] Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe matˈtsiːni]; 22 June 1805  – 10 March 1872) was an Italian politician, journalist, activist for the unification of Italy, and spearhead of the Italian revolutionary movement. His efforts helped bring about the independent and unified Italy[7] in place of the several separate states, many dominated by foreign powers, that existed until the 19th century. He also helped define the modern European movement for popular democracy in a republican state.[8]
+Mazzini's thoughts had a very considerable influence on the Italian and European republican movements, in the Constitution of Italy, about Europeanism, and, more nuanced, on many politicians of a later period: among them, men like U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, but also post-colonial leaders such as Gandhi, Savarkar, Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, Kwame Nkrumah, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sun Yat-sen.[9]
+Mazzini was born in Genoa, then part of the Ligurian Republic, under the rule of the French Empire. His father, Giacomo Mazzini, originally from Chiavari, was a university professor who had adhered to Jacobin ideology; his mother, Maria Drago, was renowned for her beauty and religious (Jansenist) fervour. From a very early age, Mazzini showed good learning qualities (as well as a precocious interest in politics and literature). He was admitted to university at 14, graduating in law in 1826, and initially practiced as a "poor man's lawyer". Mazzini also hoped to become a historical novelist or a dramatist, and in the same year wrote his first essay, Dell'amor patrio di Dante ("On Dante's Patriotic Love"), published in 1827. In 1828–29 he collaborated with a Genoese newspaper, L'Indicatore Genovese, which was however soon closed by the Piedmontese authorities. He then became one of the leading authors of L'Indicatore Livornese, published at Livorno by F. D. Guerrazzi, until this paper was closed down by the authorities, too.
+In 1827 Mazzini travelled to Tuscany, where he became a member of the Carbonari, a secret association with political purposes. On 31 October of that year he was arrested at Genoa and interned at Savona. In early 1831, he was released from prison, but confined to a small hamlet. He chose exile instead, moving to Geneva in Switzerland.
+In 1831 Mazzini went to Marseille, where he became a popular figure among the Italian exiles. He was a frequent visitor to the apartment of Giuditta Bellerio Sidoli, a beautiful Modenese widow who became his lover.[10] In August 1832 Giuditta Sidoli gave birth to a boy, almost certainly Mazzini's son, whom she named Joseph Démosthène Adolpe Aristide after members of the family of Démosthène Ollivier, with whom Mazzini was staying. The Olliviers took care of the child in June 1833 when Giuditta and Mazzini left for Switzerland. The child died in February 1835.[11]
+Mazzini organized a new political society called Young Italy. Young Italy was a secret society formed to promote Italian unification: "One, free, independent, republican nation."[12] Mazzini believed that a popular uprising would create a unified Italy, and would touch off a European-wide revolutionary movement.[10] The group's motto was God and the People,[13] and its basic principle was the unification of the several states and kingdoms of the peninsula into a single republic as the only true foundation of Italian liberty. The new nation had to be: "One, Independent, Free Republic".
+Mazzini's political activism met some success in Tuscany, Abruzzi, Sicily, Piedmont, and his native Liguria, especially among several military officers. Young Italy counted about 60,000 adherents in 1833, with branches in Genoa and other cities. In that year Mazzini first attempted insurrection, which would spread from Chambéry (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), Alessandria, Turin, and Genoa. However, the Savoy government discovered the plot before it could begin and many revolutionaries (including Vincenzo Gioberti) were arrested. The repression was ruthless: 12 participants were executed, while Mazzini's best friend and director of the Genoese section of the Giovine Italia, Jacopo Ruffini, killed himself. Mazzini was tried in absentia and sentenced to death.
+Despite this setback (whose victims later created numerous doubts and psychological strife in Mazzini), he organized another uprising for the following year. A group of Italian exiles were to enter Piedmont from Switzerland and spread the revolution there, while Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had recently joined Young Italy, was to do the same from Genoa. However, the Piedmontese troops easily crushed the new attempt.
+In the spring of 1834, while at Bern, Mazzini and a dozen refugees from Italy, Poland, and Germany founded a new association with the grandiose name of Young Europe. Its basic, and equally grandiose idea, was that, as the French Revolution of 1789 had enlarged the concept of individual liberty, another revolution would now be needed for national liberty; and his vision went further because he hoped that in the no doubt distant future free nations might combine to form a loosely federal Europe with some kind of federal assembly to regulate their common interests. [...] His intention was nothing less than to overturn the European settlement agreed in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, which had reestablished an oppressive hegemony of a few great powers and blocked the emergence of smaller nations. [...] Mazzini hoped, but without much confidence, that his vision of a league or society of independent nations would be realized in his own lifetime. In practice Young Europe lacked the money and popular support for more than a short-term existence. Nevertheless he always remained faithful to the ideal of a united continent for which the creation of individual nations would be an indispensable preliminary.[14]
+On 28 May 1834 Mazzini was arrested at Solothurn, and exiled from Switzerland. He moved to Paris, where he was again imprisoned on 5 July. He was released only after promising he would move to England. Mazzini, together with a few Italian friends, moved in January 1837 to live in London in very poor economic conditions.
+On 30 April 1840 Mazzini reformed the Giovine Italia in London, and on 10 November of the same year he began issuing the Apostolato popolare ("Apostleship of the People").
+A succession of failed attempts at promoting further uprisings in Sicily, Abruzzi, Tuscany, and Lombardy-Venetia discouraged Mazzini for a long period, which dragged on until 1840. He was also abandoned by Sidoli, who had returned to Italy to rejoin her children. The help of his mother pushed Mazzini to create several organizations aimed at the unification or liberation of other nations, in the wake of Giovine Italia:[15] "Young Germany", "Young Poland", and "Young Switzerland", which were under the aegis of "Young Europe" (Giovine Europa). He also created an Italian school for poor people active from 10 November 1841 at 5 Greville Street, London.[16] From London he also wrote an endless series of letters to his agents in Europe and South America, and made friends with Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane. The "Young Europe" movement also inspired a group of young Turkish army cadets and students who, later in history, named themselves the "Young Turks".
+In 1843 he organized another riot in Bologna, which attracted the attention of two young officers of the Austrian Navy, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera. With Mazzini's support, they landed near Cosenza (Kingdom of Naples), but were arrested and executed. Mazzini accused the British government of having passed information about the expeditions to the Neapolitans, and question was raised in the British Parliament. When it was admitted[17] that his private letters had indeed been opened, and its contents revealed by the Foreign Office[18] to the Austrian[19] and Neapolitan governments, Mazzini gained popularity and support among the British liberals, who were outraged by such a blatant intrusion of the government into his private correspondence.[16]
+In 1847 he moved again to London, where he wrote a long "open letter" to Pope Pius IX, whose apparently liberal reforms had gained him a momentary status as possible paladin of the unification of Italy. The Pope, however, did not reply. He also founded the People's International League. By 8 March 1848 Mazzini was in Paris, where he launched a new political association, the Associazione Nazionale Italiana.
+On 7 April 1848 Mazzini reached Milan, whose population had rebelled against the Austrian garrison and established a provisional government. The First Italian War of Independence, started by the Piedmontese king Charles Albert to exploit the favourable circumstances in Milan, turned into a total failure. Mazzini, who had never been popular in the city because he wanted Lombardy to become a republic instead of joining Piedmont, abandoned Milan. He joined Garibaldi's irregular force at Bergamo, moving to Switzerland with him.
+On 9 February 1849 a republic was declared in Rome, with Pius IX already having been forced to flee to Gaeta the preceding November. On the same day the Republic was declared, Mazzini reached the city. He was appointed, together with Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi, as a member of the "triumvirate" of the new republic on 29 March, becoming soon the true leader of the government and showing good administrative capabilities in social reforms. However, when the French troops called by the Pope made clear that the resistance of the Republican troops, led by Garibaldi, was in vain. On 12 July 1849, Mazzini set out for Marseille, from where he moved again to Switzerland.
+Mazzini spent all of 1850 hiding from the Swiss police. In July he founded the association Amici di Italia (Friends of Italy) in London, to attract consensus towards the Italian liberation cause. Two failed riots in Mantua (1852) and Milan (1853) were a crippling blow for the Mazzinian organization, whose prestige never recovered. He later opposed the alliance signed by Savoy with Austria for the Crimean War. Also in vain was the expedition of Felice Orsini in Carrara of 1853–54.
+In 1856 he returned to Genoa to organize a series of uprisings: the only serious attempt was that of Carlo Pisacane in Calabria, which again met a dismaying end. Mazzini managed to escape the police, but was condemned to death by default. From this moment on, Mazzini was more of a spectator than a protagonist of the Italian Risorgimento, whose reins were now strongly in the hands of the Savoyard monarch Victor Emmanuel II and his skilled prime minister, Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour. The latter defined him as "Chief of the assassins".
+In 1858 he founded another journal in London, Pensiero e azione ("Thought and Action"). Also there, on 21 February 1859, together with 151 republicans he signed a manifesto against the alliance between Piedmont and the Emperor of France which resulted in the Second War of Italian Independence and the conquest of Lombardy. On 2 May 1860 he tried to reach Garibaldi, who was going to launch his famous Expedition of the Thousand[20] in southern Italy. In the same year he released Doveri dell'uomo ("Duties of Man"), a synthesis of his moral, political and social thoughts. In mid-September he was in Naples, then under Garibaldi's dictatorship, but was invited by the local vice-dictator Giorgio Pallavicino to move away.
+The new Kingdom of Italy was created in 1861 under the Savoy monarchy. In 1862, Mazzini joined Garibaldi in his failed attempt to free Rome. In 1866, Italy joined the Austro-Prussian War and gained Venetia. At this time Mazzini frequently spoke out against how the unification of his country was being achieved, and in 1867 he refused a seat in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. In 1870, he tried to start a rebellion in Sicily, and was arrested and imprisoned in Gaeta. He was freed in October, in the amnesty declared after the Kingdom finally took Rome, and returned to London in mid-December.
+Giuseppe Mazzini died of pleurisy at the house known now as Domus Mazziniana in Pisa in 1872, at the age of 66. His body was embalmed by Paolo Gorini. His funeral was held in Genoa, with 100,000 people taking part in it.
+Mazzini, an Italian nationalist, was a fervent advocate of republicanism and envisioned a united, free and independent Italy. Unlike his contemporary Garibaldi, who was also a republican, Mazzini refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the House of Savoy until after the capture of Rome.
+Mazzini was vigorously opposed to Marxism and Communism, and in 1871 he condemned the socialist revolt in France that led to the creation of the short-lived Paris Commune.[21] This later caused Karl Marx to refer to Mazzini as a "reactionary" and an "old ass".[22][23] Mazzini rejected the Marxist doctrines of class struggle and materialism, and stressed the need for class collaboration[21][24]
+Mazzini also rejected the classical liberal principles of the Enlightenment based on the doctrine of individualism, which he criticized as "presupposing either metaphysical materialism or political atheism."[25]
+Influenced by his Jansenist upbringing, Mazzini's thought is characterized by a strong religious fervor and deep sense of spirituality. Mazzini described himself as a Christian and emphasized the necessity of faith and a relationship with God, while vehemently denouncing rationalism and atheism. His motto was Dio e Popolo ("God and People"). He regarded patriotism as a duty, and love for the Fatherland as a divine mission, saying that the Fatherland was "the home wherein God has placed us, among brothers and sisters linked to us by the family ties of a common religion, history, and language."[26]
+In his 1835 publication Fede e avvenire ("Faith and the Future"), he wrote: "We must rise again as a religious party. The religious element is universal and immortal ... The initiators of a new world, we are bound to lay the foundations of a moral unity, a Humanitarian Catholicism."[27] However, Mazzini's relationship with the Catholic Church and the Papacy was not always a kind one. While he initially supported Pope Pius IX upon his election, writing an open letter to him in 1847, he later published a scathing attack against the pope in his Sull'Enciclica di Papa Pio IX ("On the Encyclical of Pope Pius IX") in 1849.
+Although some of his religious views were at odds with the Catholic Church and the Papacy, and his writings often were tinged with anti-clericalism, at the same time Mazzini criticized Protestantism, stating that it is "divided and subdivided into a thousand sects, all founded on the rights of individual conscience, all eager to make war on one another, and perpetuating that anarchy of beliefs which is the sole true cause of the social and political disturbances that torment the peoples of Europe."[28]
+Mazzini formulated a concept known as thought and action, in which thought and action must be joined together, and every thought must be followed by action, therefore rejecting intellectualism and the notion of divorcing theory from practice.[29] He likewise rejected the concept of the "rights of man" which had developed during the Age of Enlightenment, arguing instead that individual rights were a duty to be won through hard work, sacrifice and virtue, rather than "rights" which were intrinsically owed to man. He outlined his thought in his Doveri dell'uomo ("Duties of Man"), published in 1860.
+In Doveri dell'uomo ("Duties of Man", 1860) Mazzini called for recognition of women's rights. After his many encounters with political philosophers in England, France and across Europe, he had decided that the principle of equality between men and women was fundamental to building a truly democratic Italian nation.  He called for the end of women's social and judicial subordination to men. His vigorous position heightened attention to gender among European thinkers who were already considering democracy and nationalism. Mazzini helped intellectuals see women's rights not merely a peripheral topic but as a fundamental goal necessary for the regeneration of old nations and the rebirth of new ones.[30] Mazzini admired Jessie White Mario who was described by Giuseppe Garibaldi as the "Bravest Woman of Modern Time". Jessie joined Garibaldi's Redshirts (Italy) for the 1859, 1860 campaign. As a correspondent for the Daily News she witnessed almost every fight that had brought on the unification of Italy.[31]
+Karl Marx, in an interview by R. Landor from 1871, said that Mazzini's ideas represented "nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic." Marx believed, especially after the Revolutions of 1848, that Mazzini's point of view had become reactionary, and the proletariat had nothing to do with it.[22] In another interview, Marx described Mazzini as "that everlasting old ass".[23]
+Mazzini, in turn, described Marx as "a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind" and declared that "Despite the communist egalitarianism which [Marx] preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party, admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition."[32]
+Mazzini's socio-political thought has been referred to as Mazzinianism, and his worldview as the Mazzinian Conception, terms which were later utilized by Benito Mussolini and Fascists such as Giovanni Gentile to describe their political ideology and spiritual conception of life.[25][29][33][34]
+Metternich described Mazzini as "the most influential revolutionary in Europe."[35]
+Carl Schurz, in Volume I of his 'Reminiscences' (New York:  McClure's Publ. Co., 1907, see Chapters XIII and XIV), gives a biographical sketch of Mazzini and recalls two meetings he had had with him when they were both in London in 1851.
+While the book 10,000 Famous Freemasons by William R. Denslow lists Mazzini as a Mason, and even a Past Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, articles on the Grand Orient of Italy's own website question whether he was ever a regular Mason and do not list him as a Past Grand Master.[36]
+Often viewed in the Italy of the time as a god-like figure, Mazzini was nonetheless denounced by many of his compatriots as a traitor. Contemporary historians[who?] tended to believe that he ceased to contribute anything productive or useful after 1849, but modern ones[who?] take a more favorable opinion of him. The antifascist Mazzini Society, founded in the United States in 1939 by Italian political refugees, took his name; they, like him, served Italy from exile.
+In London, Mazzini resided at 155 North Gower Street, near Euston Square, which is now marked with a commemorative blue plaque.[37] (155 is next door to 157 North Gower Street, which doubles as 221b Baker Street in the BBC adaptation of Sherlock.). A plaque on Laystall Street in Clerkenwell, London's Little Italy during the 1850s, also pays tribute Giuseppe Mazzini[how?].[38]
+A bust of Mazzini is in New York's Central Park between 67th and 68th streets just west of the West Drive.
+The 1973–1974 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honor.

en/221.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@

+The Andes, Andes Mountains or Andean Mountains (Spanish: Cordillera de los Andes) are the longest continental mountain range in the world, forming a continuous highland along the western edge of South America. The range is 7,000 km (4,300 mi) long, 200 to 700 km (120 to 430 mi) wide (widest between 18° south and 20° south latitude), and has an average height of about 4,000 m (13,000 ft). The Andes extend from north to south through seven South American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
+Along their length, the Andes are split into several ranges, separated by intermediate depressions. The Andes are the location of several high plateaus—some of which host major cities such as Quito, Bogotá, Cali, Arequipa, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Sucre, Mérida and La Paz. The Altiplano plateau is the world's second-highest after the Tibetan plateau. These ranges are in turn grouped into three major divisions based on climate: the Tropical Andes, the Dry Andes, and the Wet Andes.
+The Andes Mountains are the highest mountain range outside Asia. The highest mountain outside Asia, Argentina's Mount Aconcagua, rises to an elevation of about 6,961 m (22,838 ft) above sea level. The peak of Chimborazo in the Ecuadorian Andes is farther from the Earth's center than any other location on the Earth's surface, due to the equatorial bulge resulting from the Earth's rotation. The world's highest volcanoes are in the Andes, including Ojos del Salado on the Chile-Argentina border, which rises to 6,893 m (22,615 ft).
+The Andes are also part of the American Cordillera, a chain of mountain ranges (cordillera) that consists of an almost continuous sequence of mountain ranges that form the western "backbone" of North America, Central America, South America and Antarctica.
+The etymology of the word Andes has been debated. The majority consensus is that it derives from the Quechua word anti, which means "east"[1] as in Antisuyu (Quechua for "east region"),[1] one of the four regions of the Inca Empire.
+The term cordillera comes from the Spanish word cordel, meaning "rope",[2] and is used as a descriptive name for several contiguous sections of the Andes, as well as the entire Andean range, and the combined mountain chain along the western part of the North and South American continents.
+The Andes can be divided into three sections:
+The Leeward Antilles islands Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, which lie in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela, were formerly thought to represent the submerged peaks of the extreme northern edge of the Andes range, but ongoing geological studies indicate that such a simplification does not do justice to the complex tectonic boundary between the South American and Caribbean plates.[4]
+Marañón • Central Andean • Patagonian
+Aluk Plate (formerly) • Antarctic Plate • Carnegie Ridge • Chile Rise • Farallon Plate (formerly) • Juan Fernández Ridge • Nazca Plate • Nazca Ridge
+Dolores-Guayaquil • Cordillera Blanca • Cochabamba • Domeyko • El Tigre • San Ramón • Liquiñe-Ofqui • Magallanes-Fagnano
+Northern Zone • Peruvian flat-slab • Central Zone • Pampean flat-slab • Southern Zone • Patagonian Gap • Austral Zone
+Arequipa-Antofalla • Mejillonia • Chilenia • Chaitenia • Chiloé Block • Cuyania • Pampia • Patagonia • Fitz Roy • Madre de Dios
+The Andes are a Mesozoic–Tertiary orogenic belt of mountains along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a zone of volcanic activity that encompasses the Pacific rim of the Americas as well as the Asia-Pacific region. The Andes are the result of tectonic plate processes, caused by the subduction of oceanic crust beneath the South American Plate. It is the result of a convergent plate boundary between the Nazca Plate and the South American Plate. The main cause of the rise of the Andes is the compression of the western rim of the South American Plate due to the subduction of the Nazca Plate and the Antarctic Plate. To the east, the Andes range is bounded by several sedimentary basins, such as Orinoco, Amazon Basin, Madre de Dios and Gran Chaco, that separate the Andes from the ancient cratons in eastern South America. In the south, the Andes share a long boundary with the former Patagonia Terrane. To the west, the Andes end at the Pacific Ocean, although the Peru-Chile trench can be considered their ultimate western limit. From a geographical approach, the Andes are considered to have their western boundaries marked by the appearance of coastal lowlands and a less rugged topography. The Andes Mountains also contain large quantities of iron ore located in many mountains within the range.
+The Andean orogen has a series of bends or oroclines. The Bolivian Orocline is a seaward concave bending in the coast of South America and the Andes Mountains at about 18° S.[5][6] At this point, the orientation of the Andes turns from Northwest in Peru to South in Chile and Argentina.[6] The Andean segment north and south of the Orocline have been rotated 15° to 20° counter clockwise and clockwise respectively.[6][7] The Bolivian Orocline area overlaps with the area of maximum width of the Altiplano Plateau and according to Isacks (1988) the Orocline is related to crustal shortening.[5] The specific point at 18° S where the coastline bends is known as the "Arica Elbow".[8] Further south lies the Maipo Orocline a more subtle Orocline between 30° S and 38°S with a seaward-concave break in trend at 33° S.[9] Near the southern tip of the Andes lies the Patagonian Orocline.[10]
+The western rim of the South American Plate has been the place of several pre-Andean orogenies since at least the late Proterozoic and early Paleozoic, when several terranes and microcontinents collided and amalgamated with the ancient cratons of eastern South America, by then the South American part of Gondwana.
+The formation of the modern Andes began with the events of the Triassic when Pangaea began the break up that resulted in developing several rifts. The development continued through the Jurassic Period. It was during the Cretaceous Period that the Andes began to take their present form, by the uplifting, faulting and folding of sedimentary and metamorphic rocks of the ancient cratons to the east. The rise of the Andes has not been constant, as different regions have had different degrees of tectonic stress, uplift, and erosion.
+Tectonic forces above the subduction zone along the entire west coast of South America where the Nazca Plate and a part of the Antarctic Plate are sliding beneath the South American Plate continue to produce an ongoing orogenic event resulting in minor to major earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to this day. In the extreme south, a major transform fault separates Tierra del Fuego from the small Scotia Plate. Across the 1,000 km (620 mi) wide Drake Passage lie the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula south of the Scotia Plate which appear to be a continuation of the Andes chain.[11]
+The regions immediately east of the Andes experience a series of changes resulting from the Andean orogeny. Parts of the Sunsás Orogen in Amazonian craton disappeared from the surface of earth being overridden by the Andes.[12]
+The Sierras de Córdoba, where the effects of the ancient Pampean orogeny can be observed, owe their modern uplift and relief to the Andean orogeny in the Tertiary.[13] Further south in southern Patagonia the onset of the Andean orogeny caused the Magallanes Basin to evolve from being an extensional back-arc basin in the Mesozoic to being a compressional foreland basin in the Cenozoic.[14]
+The Andes range has many active volcanoes distributed in four volcanic zones separated by areas of inactivity. The Andean volcanism is a result of subduction of the Nazca Plate and Antarctic Plate underneath the South American Plate. The belt is subdivided into four main volcanic zones that are separated from each other by volcanic gaps. The volcanoes of the belt are diverse in terms of activity style, products and morphology. While some differences can be explained by which volcanic zone a volcano belongs to, there are significant differences inside volcanic zones and even between neighbouring volcanoes. Despite being a type location for calc-alkalic and subduction volcanism, the Andean Volcanic Belt has a large range of volcano-tectonic settings, such as rift systems and extensional zones, transpressional faults, subduction of mid-ocean ridges and seamount chains apart from a large range of crustal thicknesses and magma ascent paths, and different amount of crustal assimilations.
+The Andes Mountains host large ore and salt deposits and some of their eastern fold and thrust belt acts as traps for commercially exploitable amounts of hydrocarbons. In the forelands of the Atacama Desert some of the largest porphyry copper mineralizations occurs making Chile and Peru the first and second largest exporters of copper in the world. Porphyry copper in the western slopes of the Andes has been generated by hydrothermal fluids (mostly water) during the cooling of plutons or volcanic systems. The porphyry mineralization further benefited from the dry climate that let them largely out of the disturbing actions of meteoric water. The dry climate in the central western Andes has also led to the creation of extensive saltpeter deposits which were extensively mined until the invention of synthetic nitrates. Yet another result of the dry climate are the salars of Atacama and Uyuni, the first one being the largest source of lithium today and the second the world's largest reserve of the element. Early Mesozoic and Neogene plutonism in Bolivia's Cordillera Central created the Bolivian tin belt as well as the famous, now depleted, deposits of Cerro Rico de Potosí.
+The climate in the Andes varies greatly depending on latitude, altitude, and proximity to the sea. Temperature, atmospheric pressure and humidity decrease in higher elevations. The southern section is rainy and cool, the central section is dry. The northern Andes are typically rainy and warm, with an average temperature of 18 °C (64 °F) in Colombia. The climate is known to change drastically in rather short distances. Rainforests exist just kilometres away from the snow-covered peak Cotopaxi. The mountains have a large effect on the temperatures of nearby areas. The snow line depends on the location. It is at between 4,500 and 4,800 m (14,800 and 15,700 ft) in the tropical Ecuadorian, Colombian, Venezuelan, and northern Peruvian Andes, rising to 4,800–5,200 m (15,700–17,100 ft) in the drier mountains of southern Peru south to northern Chile south to about 30°S before descending to 4,500 m (14,760 ft) on Aconcagua at 32°S, 2,000 m (6,600 ft) at 40°S, 500 m (1,640 ft) at 50°S, and only 300 m (980 ft) in Tierra del Fuego at 55°S; from 50°S, several of the larger glaciers descend to sea level.[15]
+The Andes of Chile and Argentina can be divided in two climatic and glaciological zones: the Dry Andes and the Wet Andes. Since the Dry Andes extend from the latitudes of Atacama Desert to the area of Maule River, precipitation is more sporadic and there are strong temperature oscillations. The line of equilibrium may shift drastically over short periods of time, leaving a whole glacier in the ablation area or in the accumulation area.
+In the high Andes of central Chile and Mendoza Province, rock glaciers are larger and more common than glaciers; this is due to the high exposure to solar radiation.[16]
+Though precipitation increases with the height, there are semiarid conditions in the nearly 7,000-metre (23,000 ft) highest mountains of the Andes. This dry steppe climate is considered to be typical of the subtropical position at 32–34° S. The valley bottoms have no woods, just dwarf scrub. The largest glaciers, as e.g. the Plomo glacier and the Horcones glaciers, do not even reach 10 km (6.2 mi) in length and have an only insignificant ice thickness. At glacial times, however, c. 20,000 years ago, the glaciers were over ten times longer. On the east side of this section of the Mendozina Andes, they flowed down to 2,060 m (6,760 ft) and on the west side to about 1,220 m (4,000 ft) above sea level.[17][18] The massifs of Cerro Aconcagua (6,961 m (22,838 ft)), Cerro Tupungato (6,550 m (21,490 ft)) and Nevado Juncal (6,110 m (20,050 ft)) are tens of kilometres away from each other and were connected by a joint ice stream network. The Andes' dendritic glacier arms, i.e. components of valley glaciers, were up to 112.5 km (69.9 mi) long, over 1,250 m (4,100 ft) thick and overspanned a vertical distance of 5,150 m (16,900 ft). The climatic glacier snowline (ELA) was lowered from 4,600 m (15,100 ft) to 3,200 m (10,500 ft) at glacial times.[17][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]
+The Andean region cuts across several natural and floristic regions due to its extension from Caribbean Venezuela to cold, windy and wet Cape Horn passing through the hyperarid Atacama Desert. Rainforests and tropical dry forests[27] used to encircle much of the northern Andes but are now greatly diminished, especially in the Chocó and inter-Andean valleys of Colombia. Opposite of the humid Andean slopes are the relatively dry Andean slopes in most of western Peru, Chile and Argentina. Along with several Interandean Valles, they are typically dominated by deciduous woodland, shrub and xeric vegetation, reaching the extreme in the slopes near the virtually lifeless Atacama Desert.
+About 30,000 species of vascular plants live in the Andes, with roughly half being endemic to the region, surpassing the diversity of any other hotspot.[28] The small tree Cinchona pubescens, a source of quinine which is used to treat malaria, is found widely in the Andes as far south as Bolivia. Other important crops that originated from the Andes are tobacco and potatoes. The high-altitude Polylepis forests and woodlands are found in the Andean areas of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. These trees, by locals referred to as Queñua, Yagual and other names, can be found at altitudes of 4,500 m (14,760 ft) above sea level. It remains unclear if the patchy distribution of these forests and woodlands is natural, or the result of clearing which began during the Incan period. Regardless, in modern times the clearance has accelerated, and the trees are now considered to be highly endangered, with some believing that as little as 10% of the original woodland remains.[29]
+The Andes are rich in fauna: With almost 1,000 species, of which roughly 2/3 are endemic to the region, the Andes are the most important region in the world for amphibians.[28]
+The diversity of animals in the Andes is high, with almost 600 species of mammals (13% endemic), more than 1,700 species of birds (about 1/3 endemic), more than 600 species of reptile (about 45% endemic), and almost 400 species of fish (about 1/3 endemic).[28]
+The vicuña and guanaco can be found living in the Altiplano, while the closely related domesticated llama and alpaca are widely kept by locals as pack animals and for their meat and wool. The crepuscular (active during dawn and dusk) chinchillas, two threatened members of the rodent order, inhabit the Andes' alpine regions.[30][31] The Andean condor, the largest bird of its kind in the Western Hemisphere, occurs throughout much of the Andes but generally in very low densities.[32] Other animals found in the relatively open habitats of the high Andes include the huemul, cougar, foxes in the genus Pseudalopex,[30][31] and, for birds, certain species of tinamous (notably members of the genus Nothoprocta), Andean goose, giant coot, flamingos (mainly associated with hypersaline lakes), lesser rhea, Andean flicker, diademed sandpiper-plover, miners, sierra-finches and diuca-finches.[32]
+Lake Titicaca hosts several endemics, among them the highly endangered Titicaca flightless grebe[32] and Titicaca water frog.[33] A few species of hummingbirds, notably some hillstars, can be seen at altitudes above 4,000 m (13,100 ft), but far higher diversities can be found at lower altitudes, especially in the humid Andean forests ("cloud forests") growing on slopes in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and far northwestern Argentina.[32] These forest-types, which includes the Yungas and parts of the Chocó, are very rich in flora and fauna, although few large mammals exist, exceptions being the threatened mountain tapir, spectacled bear and yellow-tailed woolly monkey.[30]
+Birds of humid Andean forests include mountain-toucans, quetzals and the Andean cock-of-the-rock, while mixed species flocks dominated by tanagers and furnariids commonly are seen – in contrast to several vocal but typically cryptic species of wrens, tapaculos and antpittas.[32]
+A number of species such as the royal cinclodes and white-browed tit-spinetail are associated with Polylepis, and consequently also threatened.[32]
+The Andes Mountains form a north–south axis of cultural influences. A long series of cultural development culminated in the expansion of the Inca civilization and Inca Empire in the central Andes during the 15th century. The Incas formed this civilization through imperialistic militarism as well as careful and meticulous governmental management.[34] The government sponsored the construction of aqueducts and roads in addition to preexisting installations. Some of these constructions are still in existence today.
+Devastated by European diseases to which they had no immunity and civil wars, in 1532 the Incas were defeated by an alliance composed of tens of thousands of allies from nations they had subjugated (e.g. Huancas, Chachapoyas, Cañaris) and a small army of 180 Spaniards led by Francisco Pizarro. One of the few Inca sites the Spanish never found in their conquest was Machu Picchu, which lay hidden on a peak on the eastern edge of the Andes where they descend to the Amazon. The main surviving languages of the Andean peoples are those of the Quechua and Aymara language families. Woodbine Parish and Joseph Barclay Pentland surveyed a large part of the Bolivian Andes from 1826 to 1827.
+In modern times, the largest cities in the Andes are Bogotá, with a population of about eight million, and Santiago, Medellín, and Cali. Lima is a coastal city adjacent to the Andes and is the largest city of all Andean countries. It is the seat of the Andean Community of Nations.
+La Paz, Bolivia's seat of government, is the highest capital city in the world, at an elevation of approximately 3,650 m (11,975 ft). Parts of the La Paz conurbation, including the city of El Alto, extend up to 4,200 m (13,780 ft).
+Other cities in or near the Andes include Bariloche, Catamarca, Jujuy, Mendoza, Salta, San Juan, and Tucumán in Argentina; Calama and Rancagua in Chile; Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Sucre, Sacaba, Tarija, and Yacuiba in Bolivia; Arequipa, Cajamarca, Cusco, Huancayo, Huánuco, Huaraz, Juliaca, and Puno in Peru; Ambato, Cuenca, Ibarra, Loja, Quito, Riobamba and Tulcán in Ecuador; Armenia, Cúcuta, Bucaramanga, Duitama, Ibagué, Ipiales, Manizales, Palmira, Pasto, Pereira, Popayán, Sogamoso, Tunja, and Villavicencio in Colombia; and Barquisimeto, Mérida, San Cristóbal, and Valera in Venezuela; . The cities of Caracas, Valencia, and Maracay are in the Venezuelan Coastal Range, which is a debatable extension of the Andes at the northern extreme of South America.
+Cities and large towns are connected with asphalt-paved roads, while smaller towns are often connected by dirt roads, which may require a four-wheel-drive vehicle.[35]
+The rough terrain has historically put the costs of building highways and railroads that cross the Andes out of reach of most neighboring countries, even with modern civil engineering practices. For example, the main crossover of the Andes between Argentina and Chile is still accomplished through the Paso Internacional Los Libertadores. Only recently the ends of some highways that came rather close to one another from the east and the west have been connected.[36] Much of the transportation of passengers is done via aircraft.
+However, there is one railroad that connects Chile with Peru via the Andes, and there are others that make the same connection via southern Bolivia. See railroad maps of that region.
+There are multiple highways in Bolivia that cross the Andes. Some of these were built during a period of war between Bolivia and Paraguay, in order to transport Bolivian troops and their supplies to the war front in the lowlands of southeastern Bolivia and western Paraguay.
+For decades, Chile claimed ownership of land on the eastern side of the Andes. However, these claims were given up in about 1870 during the War of the Pacific between Chile, the allied Bolivia and Peru, in a diplomatic deal to keep Peru out of the war. The Chilean Army and Chilean Navy defeated the combined forces of Bolivia and Peru, and Chile took over Bolivia's only province on the Pacific Coast, some land from Peru that was returned to Peru decades later. Bolivia has been a completely landlocked country ever since. It mostly uses seaports in eastern Argentina and Uruguay for international trade because its diplomatic relations with Chile have been suspended since 1978.
+Because of the tortuous terrain in places, villages and towns in the mountains—to which travel via motorized vehicles is of little use—are still located in the high Andes of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. Locally, the relatives of the camel, the llama, and the alpaca continue to carry out important uses as pack animals, but this use has generally diminished in modern times. Donkeys, mules, and horses are also useful.
+The ancient peoples of the Andes such as the Incas have practiced irrigation techniques for over 6,000 years. Because of the mountain slopes, terracing has been a common practice. Terracing, however, was only extensively employed after Incan imperial expansions to fuel their expanding realm. The potato holds a very important role as an internally consumed staple crop. Maize was also an important crop for these people, and was used for the production of chicha, important to Andean native people. Currently, tobacco, cotton and coffee are the main export crops. Coca, despite eradication programmes in some countries, remains an important crop for legal local use in a mildly stimulating herbal tea, and, both controversially and illegally, for the production of cocaine.
+In unirrigated land, pasture is the most common type of land use. In the rainy season (summer), part of the rangeland is used for cropping (mainly potatoes, barley, broad beans and wheat).
+Irrigation is helpful in advancing the sowing data of the summer crops which guarantees an early yield in the period of food shortage. Also, by early sowing, maize can be cultivated higher up in the mountains (up to 3,800 m (12,500 ft)). In addition it makes cropping in the dry season (winter) possible and allows the cultivation of frost resistant vegetable crops like onion and carrot.[37]
+The Andes rose to fame for their mineral wealth during the Spanish conquest of South America. Although Andean Amerindian peoples crafted ceremonial jewelry of gold and other metals, the mineralizations of the Andes were first mined on a large scale after the Spanish arrival. Potosí in present-day Bolivia and Cerro de Pasco in Peru was one of the principal mines of the Spanish Empire in the New World. Río de la Plata and Argentina[38] derive their names from the silver of Potosí.
+Currently, mining in the Andes of Chile and Peru places these countries as the first and third major producers of copper in the world. Peru also contains the 4th largest goldmine in the world: the Yanacocha. The Bolivian Andes produce principally tin although historically silver mining had a huge impact on the economy of 17th century Europe.
+There is a long history of mining in the Andes, from the Spanish silver mines in Potosí in the 16th century to the vast current porphyry copper deposits of Chuquicamata and Escondida in Chile and Toquepala in Peru. Other metals including iron, gold, and tin in addition to non-metallic resources are important.
+This list contains some of the major peaks in the Andes mountain range. The highest peak is Aconcagua of Argentina (see below).

en/2210.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,172 @@

+Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe ˈverdi]; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian opera composer. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron.  Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioachino Rossini, whose works significantly influenced him.
+In his early operas, Verdi demonstrated a sympathy with the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of Italy. He also participated briefly as an elected politician. The chorus "Va, pensiero" from his early opera Nabucco (1842), and similar choruses in later operas, were much in the spirit of the unification movement, and the composer himself became esteemed as a representative of these ideals. An intensely private person, Verdi, however, did not seek to ingratiate himself with popular movements and as he became professionally successful was able to reduce his operatic workload and sought to establish himself as a landowner in his native region. He surprised the musical world by returning, after his success with the opera Aida (1871), with three late masterpieces: his Requiem (1874), and the operas Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893).
+His operas remain extremely popular, especially the three peaks of his 'middle period': Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, and the 2013 bicentenary of his birth was widely celebrated in broadcasts and performances.
+Verdi, the first child of Carlo Giuseppe Verdi (1785–1867) and Luigia Uttini (1787–1851), was born at their home in Le Roncole, a village near Busseto, then in the Département Taro and within the borders of  the First French Empire following the annexation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza in 1808. The baptismal register, prepared on 11 October 1813, lists his parents Carlo and Luigia as "innkeeper" and "spinner" respectively.  Additionally, it lists Verdi as being "born yesterday", but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October.[1] Following his mother, Verdi always celebrated his birthday on 9 October, the day he himself believed he was born.[2]
+Verdi had a younger sister, Giuseppa, who died aged 17 in 1833.[2] She is said to have been his closest friend during childhood.[3] From the age of four, Verdi was given private lessons in Latin and Italian by the village schoolmaster, Baistrocchi, and at six he attended the local school. After learning to play the organ, he showed so much interest in music that his parents finally provided him with a spinet.[4] Verdi's gift for music was already apparent by 1820–21 when he began his association with the local church, serving in the choir, acting as an altar boy for a while, and taking organ lessons. After Baistrocchi's death, Verdi, at the age of eight, became the official paid organist.[5]
+The music historian Roger Parker points out that both of Verdi's parents "belonged to families of small landowners and traders, certainly not the illiterate peasants from which Verdi later liked to present himself as having emerged... Carlo Verdi was energetic in furthering his son's education...something which Verdi tended to hide in later life... [T]he picture emerges of youthful precocity eagerly nurtured by an ambitious father and of a sustained, sophisticated and elaborate formal education."[6]
+In 1823, when he was 10, Verdi's parents arranged for the boy to attend school in Busseto, enrolling him in a Ginnasio—an upper school for boys—run by Don Pietro Seletti, while they continued to run their inn at Le Roncole. Verdi returned to Busseto regularly to play the organ on Sundays, covering the distance of several kilometres on foot.[7] At age 11, Verdi received schooling in Italian, Latin, the humanities, and rhetoric. By the time he was 12, he began lessons with Ferdinando Provesi, maestro di cappella at San Bartolomeo, director of the municipal music school and co-director of the local Società Filarmonica (Philharmonic Society). Verdi later stated: "From the ages of 13 to 18 I wrote a motley assortment of pieces: marches for band by the hundred, perhaps as many little sinfonie that were used in church, in the theatre and at concerts, five or six concertos and sets of variations for pianoforte, which I played myself at concerts, many serenades, cantatas (arias, duets, very many trios) and various pieces of church music, of which I remember only a Stabat Mater."[1] This information comes from the Autobiographical Sketch which Verdi dictated to the publisher Giulio Ricordi late in life, in 1879, and remains the leading source for his early life and career.[8] Written, understandably, with the benefit of hindsight, it is not always reliable when dealing with issues more contentious than those of his childhood.[9][10]
+The other director of the Philharmonic Society was Antonio Barezzi [it], a wholesale grocer and distiller, who was described by a contemporary as a "manic dilettante" of music. The young Verdi did not immediately become involved with the Philharmonic. By June 1827, he had graduated with honours from the Ginnasio and was able to focus solely on music under Provesi. By chance, when he was 13, Verdi was asked to step in as a replacement to play in what became his first public event in his home town; he was an immediate success mostly playing his own music to the surprise of many and receiving strong local recognition.[11]
+By 1829–30, Verdi had established himself as a leader of the Philharmonic: "none of us could rival him" reported the secretary of the organisation, Giuseppe Demaldè. An eight-movement cantata, I deliri di Saul, based on a drama by Vittorio Alfieri, was written by Verdi when he was 15 and performed in Bergamo. It was acclaimed by both Demaldè and Barezzi, who commented: "He shows a vivid imagination, a philosophical outlook, and sound judgment in the arrangement of instrumental parts."[12] In late 1829, Verdi had completed his studies with Provesi, who declared that he had no more to teach him.[13] At the time, Verdi had been giving singing and piano lessons to Barezzi's daughter Margherita; by 1831, they were unofficially engaged.[1]
+Verdi set his sights on Milan, then the cultural capital of northern Italy, where he applied unsuccessfully to study at the Conservatory.[1] Barezzi made arrangements for him to become a private pupil of Vincenzo Lavigna [it], who had been maestro concertatore at La Scala, and who described Verdi's compositions as "very promising".[14] Lavigna encouraged Verdi to take out a subscription to La Scala, where he heard Maria Malibran in operas by Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini.[15] Verdi began making connections in the Milanese world of music that were to stand him in good stead. These included an introduction by Lavigna to an amateur choral group, the Società Filarmonica, led by Pietro Massini.[16] Attending the Società frequently in 1834, Verdi soon found himself functioning as rehearsal director (for Rossini's La cenerentola) and continuo player. It was Massini who encouraged him to write his first opera, originally titled Rocester, to a libretto by the journalist Antonio Piazza.[1]
+List of compositions by Giuseppe Verdi
+In mid-1834, Verdi sought to acquire Provesi's former post in Busseto but without success.  But with Barezzi's help he did obtain the secular post of maestro di musica. He taught, gave lessons, and conducted the Philharmonic for several months before returning to Milan in early 1835.[6] By the following July, he obtained his certification from Lavigna.[17] Eventually in 1835 Verdi became director of the Busseto school with a three-year contract. He married Margherita in May 1836, and by March 1837, she had given birth to their first child, Virginia Maria Luigia on 26 March 1837. Icilio Romano followed on 11 July 1838. Both the children died young, Virginia on 12 August 1838, Icilio on 22 October 1839.[1]
+In 1837, the young composer asked for Massini's assistance to stage his opera in Milan.[18] The La Scala impresario, Bartolomeo Merelli,  agreed to put on Oberto (as the reworked opera was now called, with a libretto rewritten by Temistocle Solera)[19] in November 1839. It achieved a respectable 13 additional performances, following which Merelli offered Verdi a contract for three more works.[20]
+While Verdi was working on his second opera Un giorno di regno, Margherita died of encephalitis at the age of 26. Verdi adored his wife and children and was devastated by their deaths. Un giorno, a comedy, was premiered only a few months later. It was a flop and only given the one performance.[20] Following its failure, it is claimed Verdi vowed never to compose again,[10] but in his Sketch he recounts how Merelli persuaded him to write a new opera.
+Verdi was to claim that he gradually began to work on the music for Nabucco, the libretto of which had originally been rejected by the composer Otto Nicolai:[21] "This verse today, tomorrow that, here a note, there a whole phrase, and little by little the opera was written", he later recalled.[22] By the autumn of 1841 it was complete, originally under the title Nabucodonosor. Well received at its first performance on 9 March 1842, Nabucco underpinned Verdi's success until his retirement from the theatre, twenty-nine operas (including some revised and updated versions) later.[10] At its revival in La Scala for the 1842 autumn season it was given an unprecedented (and later unequalled) total of 57 performances; within three years it had reached (among other venues) Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and Hamburg; in 1848 it was heard in New York, in 1850 in Buenos Aires. Porter comments that "similar accounts...could be provided to show how widely and rapidly all [Verdi's] other successful operas were disseminated."[23]
+A period of hard work for Verdi—with the creation of twenty operas (excluding revisions and translations)—followed over the next sixteen years, culminating in Un ballo in maschera. This period was not without its frustrations and setbacks for the young composer, and he was frequently demoralised. In April 1845, in connection with I due Foscari, he wrote: "I am happy, no matter what reception it gets, and I am utterly indifferent to everything. I cannot wait for these next three years to pass. I have to write six operas, then addio to everything."[24] In 1858 Verdi complained: "Since Nabucco, you may say, I have never had one hour of peace. Sixteen years in the galleys."[25]
+After the initial success of Nabucco, Verdi settled in Milan, making a number of influential acquaintances.  He attended the Salotto Maffei, Countess Clara Maffei's salons in Milan, becoming her lifelong friend and correspondent.[10] A revival of Nabucco followed in 1842 at La Scala where it received a run of fifty-seven performances,[26] and this led to a commission from Merelli for a new opera for the 1843 season. I Lombardi alla prima crociata was based on a libretto by Solera and premiered in February 1843. Inevitably, comparisons were made with Nabucco; but one contemporary writer noted: "If [Nabucco] created this young man's reputation, I Lombardi served to confirm it."[27]
+Verdi paid close attention to his financial contracts, making sure he was appropriately remunerated as his popularity increased. For I Lombardi and Ernani (1844) in Venice he was paid 12,000 lire (including supervision of the productions); Attila and Macbeth (1847), each brought him 18,000 lire. His contracts with the publishers Ricordi in 1847 were very specific about the amounts he was to receive for new works, first productions, musical arrangements, and so on.[28] He began to use his growing prosperity to invest in land near his birthplace. In 1844 he purchased Il Pulgaro, 62 acres (23 hectares) of farmland with a farmhouse and outbuildings, providing a home for his parents from May 1844. Later that year, he also bought the Palazzo Cavalli (now known as the Palazzo Orlandi) on the via Roma, Busseto's main street.[29] In May 1848, Verdi signed a contract for land and houses at Sant'Agata in Busseto, which had once belonged to his family.[30] It was here he built his own house, completed in 1880, now known as the Villa Verdi, where he lived from 1851 until his death.[31]
+In March 1843, Verdi visited Vienna (where Gaetano Donizetti was musical director) to oversee a production of Nabucco. The older composer, recognising Verdi's talent, noted in a letter of January 1844: "I am very, very happy to give way to people of talent like Verdi... Nothing will prevent the good Verdi from soon reaching one of the most honourable positions in the cohort of composers."[32] Verdi travelled on to Parma, where the Teatro Regio di Parma was producing Nabucco with Strepponi in the cast. For Verdi the performances were a personal triumph in his native region, especially as his father, Carlo, attended the first performance. Verdi remained in Parma for some weeks beyond his intended departure date. This fuelled speculation that the delay was due to Verdi's interest in Giuseppina Strepponi (who stated that their relationship began in 1843).[33] Strepponi was in fact known for her amorous relationships (and many illegitimate children) and her history was an awkward factor in their relationship until they eventually agreed on marriage.[34]
+After successful stagings of Nabucco in Venice (with twenty-five performances in the 1842/43 season), Verdi began negotiations with the impresario of La Fenice to stage I Lombardi, and to write a new opera.  Eventually, Victor Hugo's Hernani was chosen, with Francesco Maria Piave as librettist. Ernani was successfully premiered in 1844 and within six months had been performed at twenty other theatres in Italy, and also in Vienna.[35] The writer Andrew Porter notes that for the next ten years, Verdi's life "reads like a travel diary—a timetable of visits...to bring new operas to the stage or to supervise local premieres". La Scala premiered none of these new works, except for Giovanna d'Arco. Verdi "never forgave the Milanese for their reception of Un giorno di regno".[28]
+During this period, Verdi began to work more consistently with his librettists. He relied on Piave again for I due Foscari, performed in Rome in November 1844, then on Solera once more for Giovanna d'Arco, at La Scala in February 1845, while in August that year he was able to work with Salvadore Cammarano on Alzira for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Solera and Piave worked together on Attila for La Fenice (March 1846).[36]
+In April 1844, Verdi took on Emanuele Muzio, eight years his junior, as a pupil and amanuensis. He had known him since about 1828 as another of Barezzi's protégés.[37] Muzio, who in fact was Verdi's only pupil, became indispensable to the composer. He reported to Barezzi that Verdi "has a breadth of spirit, of generosity, a wisdom".[38] In November 1846, Muzio wrote of Verdi: "If you could see us, I seem more like a friend, rather than his pupil. We are always together at dinner, in the cafes, when we play cards...; all in all, he doesn't go anywhere without me at his side; in the house we have a big table and we both write there together, and so I always have his advice."[39] Muzio was to remain associated with Verdi, assisting in the preparation of scores and transcriptions, and later conducting many of his works in their premiere performances in the US and elsewhere outside Italy. He was chosen by Verdi as one of the executors of his will, but predeceased the composer in 1890.[40]
+After a period of illness Verdi began work on Macbeth in September 1846. He dedicated the opera to Barezzi: "I have long intended to dedicate an opera to you, as you have been a father, a benefactor and a friend for me. It was a duty I should have fulfilled sooner if imperious circumstances had not prevented me. Now, I send you Macbeth, which I prize above all my other operas, and therefore deem worthier to present to you."[41] In 1997 Martin Chusid wrote that Macbeth was the only one of Verdi's operas of his "early period" to remain regularly in the international repertoire,[42] although in the 21st century Nabucco has also entered the lists.[43]
+Strepponi's voice declined and her engagements dried up in the 1845 to 1846 period, and she returned to live in Milan whilst retaining contact with Verdi as his "supporter, promoter, unofficial adviser, and occasional secretary" until she decided to move to Paris in October 1846. Before she left Verdi gave her a letter that pledged his love. On the envelope, Strepponi wrote: "5 or 6 October 1846. They shall lay this letter on my heart when they bury me."[44]
+Verdi had completed I masnadieri for London by May 1847 except for the orchestration. This he left until the opera was in rehearsal, since he wanted to hear "la [Jenny] Lind and modify her role to suit her more exactly".[45] Verdi agreed to conduct the premiere on 22 July 1847 at Her Majesty's Theatre, as well as the second performance. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended the first performance, and for the most part, the press was generous in its praise.[46]
+For the next two years, except for two visits to Italy during periods of political unrest, Verdi was based in Paris.[47] Within a week of returning to Paris in July 1847, he received his first commission from the Paris Opéra. Verdi agreed to adapt I Lombardi to a new French libretto; the result was Jérusalem, which contained significant changes to the music and structure of the work (including an extensive ballet scene) to meet Parisian expectations.[48] Verdi was awarded the Order of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.[49][n 1] To satisfy his contracts with the publisher Francesco Lucca [it], Verdi dashed off Il Corsaro. Budden comments "In no other opera of his does Verdi appear to have taken so little interest before it was staged."[52]
+On hearing the news of the "Cinque Giornate", the "Five Days" of street fighting that took place between 18 and 22 March 1848 and temporarily drove the Austrians out of Milan, Verdi travelled there, arriving on 5 April.[53] He discovered that Piave was now "Citizen Piave" of the newly proclaimed Republic of San Marco.  Writing a patriotic letter to him in Venice, Verdi concluded "Banish every petty municipal idea! We must all extend a fraternal hand, and Italy will yet become the first nation of the world...I am drunk with joy! Imagine that there are no more Germans here!!"[54]
+Verdi had been admonished by the poet Giuseppe Giusti for turning away from patriotic subjects, the poet pleading with him to "do what you can to nourish the [sorrow of the Italian people], to strengthen it, and direct it to its goal."[55] Cammarano suggested adapting Joseph Méry's 1828 play La Bataille de Toulouse, which he described as a story "that should stir every man with an Italian soul in his breast".[56] The premiere was set for late January 1849. Verdi travelled to Rome before the end of 1848. He found that city on the verge of becoming a (short-lived) republic, which commenced within days of La battaglia di Legnano's enthusiastically received premiere. In the spirit of the time were the tenor hero's final words, "Whoever dies for the fatherland cannot be evil-minded".[57]
+Verdi had intended to return to Italy in early 1848, but was prevented by work and illness, as well as, most probably, by his increasing attachment to Strepponi. Verdi and Strepponi left Paris in July 1849, the immediate cause being an outbreak of cholera,[58] and Verdi went directly to Busseto to continue work on completing his latest opera, Luisa Miller, for a production in Naples later in the year.[59]
+Verdi was committed to the publisher Giovanni Ricordi for an opera—which became Stiffelio—for Trieste in the Spring of 1850; and, subsequently, following negotiations with La Fenice, developed a libretto with Piave and wrote the music for Rigoletto (based on Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse) for Venice in March 1851. This was the first of a sequence of three operas (followed by Il trovatore and La traviata) which were to cement his fame as a master of opera.[60]
+The failure of Stiffelio (attributable not least to the censors of the time taking offence at the taboo subject of the supposed adultery of a clergyman's wife and interfering with the text and roles) incited Verdi to take pains to rework it, although even in the completely recycled version of Aroldo (1857) it still failed to please.[61] Rigoletto, with its intended murder of royalty, and its sordid attributes, also upset the censors. Verdi would not compromise:
+What does the sack matter to the police? Are they worried about the effect it will produce?...Do they think they know better than I?...I see the hero has been made no longer ugly and hunchbacked!! Why?  A singing hunchback...why not?...I think it splendid to show this character as outwardly deformed and ridiculous, and inwardly passionate and full of love. I chose the subject for these very qualities...if they are removed I can no longer set it to music.[62]
+Verdi substituted a Duke for the King, and the public response and subsequent success of the opera all over Italy and Europe fully vindicated the composer.[63] Aware that the melody of the Duke's song "La donna è mobile" ("Woman is fickle") would become a popular hit, Verdi excluded it from orchestral rehearsals for the opera, and rehearsed the tenor separately.[64][n 2]
+For several months Verdi was preoccupied with family matters. These stemmed from the way in which the citizens of Busseto were treating Giuseppina Strepponi, with whom he was living openly in an unmarried relationship. She was shunned in the town and at church, and while Verdi appeared indifferent, she was certainly not.[66] Furthermore, Verdi was concerned about the administration of his newly acquired property at Sant'Agata.[67] A growing estrangement between Verdi and his parents was perhaps also attributable to Strepponi[68] (the suggestion that this situation was sparked by the birth of a child to Verdi and Strepponi which was given away as a foundling[69] lacks any firm evidence). In January 1851, Verdi broke off relations with his parents, and in April they were  ordered to leave Sant'Agata; Verdi found new premises for them and helped them financially to settle into their new home. It may not be coincidental that all six Verdi operas written in the period 1849–53 (La battaglia, Luisa Miller, Stiffelio, Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata), have, uniquely in his oeuvre, heroines who are, in the opera critic Joseph Kerman's words, "women who come to grief because of sexual transgression, actual or perceived". Kerman, like the psychologist Gerald Mendelssohn, sees this choice of subjects as being influenced by Verdi's uneasy passion for Strepponi.[70]
+Verdi and Strepponi moved into Sant'Agata on 1 May 1851.[71] May also brought an offer for a new opera from La Fenice, which Verdi eventually realised as La traviata. That was followed by an agreement with the Rome Opera company to present Il trovatore for January 1853.[72] Verdi now had sufficient earnings to retire, had he wished to.[73] He had reached a stage where he could develop his operas as he wished, rather than be dependent on commissions from third parties.  Il trovatore was in fact the first opera he wrote without a specific commission (apart from Oberto).[74] At around the same time he began to consider creating an opera from Shakespeare's King Lear. After first (1850) seeking a libretto from Cammarano (which never appeared), Verdi later (1857) commissioned one from Antonio Somma, but this proved intractable, and no music was ever written.[75][n 3] Verdi began work on Il trovatore after the death of his mother in June 1851. The fact that this is "the one opera of Verdi's which focuses on a mother rather than a father" is perhaps related to her death.[78]
+In the winter of 1851–52 Verdi decided to go to Paris with Strepponi, where he concluded an agreement with the Opéra to write what became Les vêpres siciliennes, his first original work in the style of grand opera. In February 1852, the couple attended a performance of Alexander Dumas fils's  play The Lady of the Camellias; Verdi immediately began to compose music for what would later become La traviata.[79]
+After his visit to Rome for Il trovatore in January 1853, Verdi worked on completing La traviata, but with little hope of its success, due to his lack of confidence in any of the singers engaged for the season.[80] Furthermore, the management insisted that the opera be given a historical, not a contemporary setting. The premiere in March 1853 was indeed a failure: Verdi wrote: "Was the fault mine or the singers'? Time will tell."[81]  Subsequent productions (following some rewriting) throughout Europe over the following two years fully vindicated the composer; Roger Parker has written "Il trovatore consistently remains one of the three or four most popular operas in the Verdian repertoire: but it has never pleased the critics".[82]
+In the eleven years up to and including Traviata, Verdi had written sixteen operas. Over the next eighteen years (up to Aida), he wrote only six new works for the stage.[83]  Verdi was happy to return to Sant'Agata and, in February 1856, was reporting a  "total abandonment of music; a little reading; some light occupation with agriculture and horses; that's all". A couple of months later, writing in the same vein to Countess Maffei he stated: "I'm not doing anything. I don't read. I don't write. I walk in the fields from morning to evening, trying to recover, so far without success, from the stomach trouble caused me by I vespri siciliani. Cursed operas!"[84] An 1858 letter by Strepponi to the publisher Léon Escudier describes the kind of lifestyle that increasingly appealed to the composer: "His love for the country has become a mania, madness, rage, and fury—anything you like that is exaggerated.  He gets up almost with the dawn, to go and examine the wheat, the maize, the vines, etc....Fortunately our tastes for this sort of life coincide, except in the matter of sunrise, which he likes to see up and dressed, and I from my bed."[85]
+Nonetheless on 15 May, Verdi signed a contract with La Fenice for an opera for the following spring. This was to be Simon Boccanegra. The couple stayed in Paris until January 1857 to deal with these proposals, and also the offer to stage the translated version of Il trovatore as a grand opera. Verdi and Strepponi travelled to Venice in March for the premiere of Simon Boccanegra, which turned out to be "a fiasco" (as Verdi reported, although on the second and third nights, the reception improved considerably).[86]
+With Strepponi, Verdi went to Naples early in January 1858 to work with Somma on the libretto of the opera Gustave III, which over a year later would become Un ballo in maschera. By this time, Verdi had begun to write about Strepponi as "my wife" and she was signing her letters as "Giuseppina Verdi".[85] Verdi raged against the stringent requirements of the Neapolitan censor stating: "I'm drowning in a sea of troubles. It's almost certain that the censors will forbid our libretto."[87] With no hope of seeing his Gustavo III staged as written, he broke his contract. This resulted in litigation and counter-litigation; with the legal issues resolved, Verdi was free to present the libretto and musical outline of Gustave III to the Rome Opera. There, the censors demanded further changes; at this point, the opera took the title Un ballo in maschera.[88]
+Arriving in Sant'Agata in March 1859 Verdi and Strepponi found the nearby city of Piacenza occupied by about 6,000 Austrian troops who had made it their base, to combat the rise of Italian interest in unification in the Piedmont region. In the ensuing Second Italian War of Independence the Austrians abandoned the region and began to leave Lombardy, although they remained in control of the Venice region under the terms of the armistice signed at Villafranca. Verdi was disgusted at this outcome: "[W]here then is the independence of Italy, so long hoped for and promised?...Venice is not Italian? After so many victories, what an outcome... It is enough to drive one mad" he wrote to Clara Maffei.[89]
+Verdi and Strepponi now decided on marriage; they travelled to Collonges-sous-Salève, a village then part of Piedmont. On 29 August 1859 the couple were married there, with only the coachman who had driven them there and the church bell-ringer as witnesses.[90] At the end of 1859, Verdi wrote to his friend Cesare De Sanctis "[Since completing Ballo] I have not made any more music, I have not seen any more music, I have not thought anymore about music. I don't even know what colour my last opera is, and I almost don't remember it." [91] He began to remodel Sant'Agata, which took most of 1860 to complete and on which he continued to work for the next twenty years. This included major work on a square room that became his workroom, his bedroom, and his office.[92]
+Having achieved some fame and prosperity, Verdi began in 1859 to take an active interest in Italian politics. His early commitment to the Risorgimento movement is difficult to estimate accurately; in the words of the music historian Philip Gossett "myths intensifying and exaggerating [such] sentiment began circulating" during the nineteenth century.[93] An example is the claim that when the "Va, pensiero" chorus in Nabucco was first sung in Milan, the audience, responding with nationalistic fervour, demanded an encore. As encores were expressly forbidden by the government at the time, such a gesture would have been extremely significant. But in fact the piece encored was not "Va, pensiero" but the hymn "Immenso Jehova".[94][n 4]
+The growth of the "identification of Verdi's music with Italian nationalist politics" perhaps began in the 1840s.[98] In 1848, the nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini (whom Verdi had met in London the previous year) requested Verdi (who complied) to write a patriotic hymn.[99] The opera historian Charles Osborne describes the 1849 La battaglia di Legnano as "an opera with a purpose" and maintains that  "while parts of Verdi's earlier operas had frequently been taken up by the fighters of the Risorgimento...this time the composer had given the movement its own opera"[100] It was not until 1859 in Naples, and only then spreading throughout Italy, that the slogan "Viva Verdi" was used as an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Viva Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), (who was then king of Piedmont).[101] After Italy was unified in 1861, many of Verdi's early operas were increasingly re-interpreted as Risorgimento works with hidden Revolutionary messages that perhaps had not been originally intended by either the composer or his librettists.[102]
+In 1859, Verdi was elected as a member of the new provincial council, and was appointed to head a group of five who would meet with King Vittorio Emanuele II in Turin. They were enthusiastically greeted along the way and in Turin Verdi himself received much of the publicity. On 17 October Verdi met with Cavour, the architect of the initial stages of Italian unification.[103] Later that year the government of Emilia was subsumed under the United Provinces of Central Italy, and Verdi's political life temporarily came to an end. Whilst still maintaining nationalist feelings, he declined in 1860 the office of provincial council member to which he had been elected in absentia.[104] Cavour however was anxious to convince a man of Verdi's stature that running for political office was essential to strengthening and securing Italy's future.[105] The composer confided to Piave some years later that "I accepted on the condition that after a few months I would resign."[106] Verdi was elected on 3 February 1861 for the town of Borgo San Donnino (Fidenza) to the Parliament of Piedmont-Sardinia in Turin (which from March 1861 became the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy), but following the death of Cavour in 1861, which deeply distressed him, he scarcely attended.[107] Later, in 1874, Verdi was appointed a member of the Italian Senate, but did not participate in its activities.[108][109]
+In the months following the staging of Ballo, Verdi was approached by several opera companies seeking a new work or making offers to stage one of his existing ones, but refused them all.[110] But when, in December 1860, an approach was made from Saint Petersburg's Imperial Theatre, the offer of 60,000 francs plus all expenses was doubtless a strong incentive. Verdi came up with the idea of adapting the 1835 Spanish play Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino by Angel Saavedra, which became La forza del destino, with Piave writing the libretto. The Verdis arrived in St. Petersburg in December 1861 for the premiere, but casting problems meant that it had to be postponed.[111]
+Returning via Paris from Russia on 24 February 1862, Verdi met two young Italian writers, the twenty-year-old Arrigo Boito and Franco Faccio. Verdi had been invited to write a piece of music for the 1862 International Exhibition in London, [112] and charged Boito with writing a text, which became the Inno delle nazioni. Boito, as a supporter of the grand opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer and an opera composer in his own right, was later in the 1860s critical of Verdi's "reliance on formula rather than form", incurring the composer's wrath. Nevertheless, he was to become Verdi's close collaborator in his final operas.[113] The St. Petersburg premiere of La forza finally took place in September 1862, and Verdi received the Order of St. Stanislaus.[114]
+A revival of Macbeth in Paris in 1865 was not a success, but he obtained a commission for a new work, Don Carlos, based on the play Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller. He and Giuseppina spent late 1866 and much of 1867 in Paris, where they heard, and did not warm to, Giacomo Meyerbeer's last opera, L'Africaine, and Richard Wagner's overture to Tannhäuser.[115] The opera's premiere in 1867 drew mixed comments.  While the critic Théophile Gautier praised the work, the composer Georges Bizet was disappointed at Verdi's changing style: "Verdi is no longer Italian. He is following Wagner."[115]
+During the 1860s and 1870s, Verdi paid great attention to his estate around Busseto, purchasing additional land, dealing with unsatisfactory (in one case, embezzling) stewards, installing irrigation, and coping with variable harvests and economic slumps.[116] In 1867, both Verdi's father Carlo, with whom he had restored good relations, and his early patron and father-in-law Antonio Barezzi, died. Verdi and Giuseppina decided to adopt Carlo's great-niece Filomena Maria Verdi, then seven years old, as their own child. She was to marry in 1878 the son of Verdi's friend and lawyer Angelo Carrara and her family became eventually the heirs of Verdi's estate.[117]
+Aida was commissioned by the Egyptian government for the opera house built by the Khedive Isma'il Pasha to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The opera house actually opened with a production of Rigoletto. The prose libretto in French by Camille du Locle, based on a scenario by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, was transformed to Italian verse by Antonio Ghislanzoni.[118] Verdi was offered the enormous sum of 150,000 francs for the opera (even though he confessed that Ancient Egypt was "a civilization I have never been able to admire"), and it was first performed in Cairo in 1871.[119] Verdi spent much of 1872 and 1873 supervising the Italian productions of Aida at Milan, Parma and Naples, effectively acting as producer and demanding high standards and adequate rehearsal time.[120] During the rehearsals for the Naples production he wrote his string quartet, the only chamber music by him to survive, and the only major work in the form by an Italian of the 19th century.[121]
+In 1869, Verdi had been asked to compose a section for a requiem mass in memory of Gioachino Rossini. He compiled and completed the requiem, but its performance was abandoned (and its premiere did not take place until 1988).[122] Five years later, Verdi reworked his "Libera Me" section of the Rossini Requiem and made it a part of his Requiem honouring Alessandro Manzoni, who had died in 1873. The complete Requiem was first performed at the cathedral in Milan on the anniversary of Manzoni's death on 22 May 1874.[122] The spinto soprano Teresa Stolz (1834–1902), who had sung in La Scala productions from 1865 onwards, was the soloist in the first and many later performances of the Requiem; in February 1872, she had created Aida in its European premiere in Milan. She became closely associated personally with Verdi (exactly how closely remains conjectural), to Giuseppina Verdi's initial disquiet; but the women were reconciled and Stolz remained a companion of Verdi after Giuseppina's death in 1897 until his own death.[123]
+Verdi conducted his Requiem in Paris, London and Vienna in 1875 and in Cologne in 1876.[108] It seemed that it would be his last work. In the words of his biographer John Rosselli, it "confirmed him as the unique presiding genius of Italian music. No fellow composer...came near him in popularity or reputation". Verdi, now in his sixties, initially seemed to withdraw into retirement. He deliberately shied away from opportunities to publicise himself or to become involved with new productions of his works,[124] but secretly he began work on Otello, which Boito (to whom the composer had been reconciled by Ricordi) had proposed to him privately in 1879. The composition was delayed by a revision of Simon Boccanegra which Verdi undertook with Boito, produced in 1881, and a revision of Don Carlos. Even when Otello was virtually completed, Verdi teased "Shall I finish it? Shall I have it performed? Hard to tell, even for me." As news leaked out, Verdi was pressed by opera houses across Europe with enquiries; eventually the opera was triumphantly premiered at La Scala in February 1887.[125]
+Following the success of Otello Verdi commented, "After having relentlessly massacred so many heroes and heroines, I have at last the right to laugh a little." He had considered a variety of comic subjects but had found none of them wholly suitable and confided his ambition to Boito. The librettist said nothing at the time but secretly began work on a libretto based on The Merry Wives of Windsor with additional material taken from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2.[126] Verdi received the draft libretto probably in early July 1889 after he had just read Shakespeare's play: "Benissimo! Benissimo!... No one could have done better than you", he wrote back to Boito. But he still had doubts: his age, his health (which he admits to being good) and his ability to complete the project: "If I were not to finish the music?". If the project failed, it would have been a waste of Boito's time, and have distracted him from completing his own new opera. Finally on 10 July 1889 he wrote again: "So be it! So let's do Falstaff! For now, let's not think of obstacles, of age, of illnesses!" Verdi emphasised the need for secrecy, but continued "If you are in the mood, then start to write."[127] Later he wrote to Boito (capitals and exclamation marks are Verdi's own): "What joy to be able to say to the public: HERE WE ARE AGAIN!!! COME AND SEE US!"[128]
+The first performance of Falstaff took place at La Scala on 9 February 1893. For the first night, official ticket prices were thirty times higher than usual. Royalty, aristocracy, critics and leading figures from the arts all over Europe were present. The performance was a huge success; numbers were encored, and at the end the applause for Verdi and the cast lasted an hour. That was followed by a tumultuous welcome when the composer, his wife and Boito arrived at the Grand Hotel de Milan.[129] Even more hectic scenes ensued when he went to Rome in May for the opera's premiere at the Teatro Costanzi, when crowds of well-wishers at the railway station initially forced Verdi to take refuge in a tool-shed. He witnessed the performance from the Royal Box at the side of King Umberto and the Queen.[130]
+In his last years Verdi undertook a number of philanthropic ventures, publishing in 1894 a song for the benefit of earthquake victims in Sicily, and from 1895 onwards planning, building and endowing a rest-home for retired musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, and building a hospital at Villanova sull'Arda, close to Busseto.[131][132] His last major composition, the choral set of Four sacred pieces, was published in 1898. In  1900 he was deeply upset at the assassination of King Umberto and sketched a setting of a poem in his memory but was unable to complete it.[133] While staying at the Grand Hotel, Verdi suffered a stroke on 21 January 1901.[n 5] He gradually grew more feeble over the next week, during which Stolz cared for him, and died on 27 January at the age of 87.[134][135]
+Verdi was initially buried in a private ceremony at Milan's Cimitero Monumentale.[136] A month later, his body was moved to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo. On this occasion, "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco was conducted by  Arturo Toscanini with a chorus of 820 singers. A huge crowd was in attendance, estimated at 300,000.[137] Boito wrote to a friend, in words which recall the mysterious final scene of Don Carlos, "[Verdi] sleeps like a King of Spain in his Escurial, under a bronze slab that completely covers him."[138]
+Not all of Verdi's personal qualities were amiable. John Rosselli concluded after writing his biography that "I do not very much like the man Verdi, in particular the autocratic rentier-cum-estate owner, part-time composer, and seemingly full-time grumbler and reactionary critic of the later years", yet admits that like other writers, he must "admire him, warts and all...a deep integrity runs beneath his life, and can be felt even when he is being unreasonable or wrong."[139]
+Budden suggests that "With Verdi...the man and the artist on many ways developed side by side." Ungainly and awkward in society in his early years, "as he became a man of property and underwent the civilizing influence of Giuseppina,...[he] acquired assurance and authority."[140] He also learnt to keep himself to himself, never discussing his private life and maintaining when it suited his convenience legends about his supposed 'peasant' origins, his materialism and his indifference to criticism.[141] Gerald Mendelsohn describes the composer as "an intensely private man who deeply resented efforts to inquire into his personal affairs. He regarded journalists and would-be biographers, as well as his neighbors in Busseto and the operatic public at large, as an intrusive lot, against whose prying attentions he needed constantly to defend himself."[142]
+Verdi was similarly never explicit about his religious beliefs. Anti-clerical by nature in his early years,[143] he nonetheless built a chapel at Sant'Agata, but is rarely recorded as going to church. Strepponi wrote in 1871 "I won't say [Verdi] is an atheist, but he is not much of a believer."[144] Rosselli comments that in the Requiem "The prospect of Hell appears to rule...[the Requiem] is troubled to the end," and offers little consolation.[145]
+See also List of compositions by Giuseppe Verdi and individual articles on the works.
+The writer Friedrich Schiller (four of whose plays were adapted as operas by Verdi) distinguished two types of artist in his 1795 essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin ranked Verdi in the 'naïve' category—"They are not...self-conscious. They do not...stand aside to contemplate their creations and express their own feelings....They are able...if they have genius, to embody their vision fully." (The 'sentimentals' seek to recreate nature and natural feelings on their own terms—Berlin instances Richard Wagner—"offering not peace, but a sword".)[146] Verdi's operas are not written according to an aesthetic theory, or with a purpose to change the tastes of their audiences. In conversation with a German visitor in 1887 he is recorded as saying that, whilst "there was much to be admired in [Wagner's operas] Tannhäuser and Lohengrin...in his recent operas [Wagner] seemed to be overstepping the bounds of what can be expressed in  music. For him "philosophical" music was incomprehensible."[147] Although Verdi's works belong, as Rosselli admits "to the most artificial of genres...[they] ring emotionally true: truth and directness make them exciting, often hugely so."[148]
+The earliest study of Verdi's music, published in 1859 by the Italian critic Abraham Basevi, already distinguished four periods in Verdi's music. The early, 'grandiose' period, ended according to Basevi with La battaglia di Legnano (1849), and a 'personal' style began with the next opera Luisa Miller. These two operas are generally agreed today by critics to mark the division between Verdi's 'early' and 'middle' periods. The 'middle' period is felt to end with La traviata (1853) and Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), with a 'late' period commencing with Simon Boccanegra (1857) running through to Aida (1871). The last two operas, Otello and Falstaff, together with the Requiem and the Four Sacred Pieces, then represent a 'final' period.[149]
+Verdi was to claim in his Sketch that during his early training with Lavigna "I did nothing but canons and fugues...No-one taught me orchestration or how to handle dramatic music."[150] He is known to have written a variety of music for the Busseto Philharmonic society, including vocal music, band music and chamber works,[151] (and including an alternative overture to Rossini's Barber of Seville)[152]  but few of these works survive. (He may have given instructions before his death to destroy his early works).[153]
+Verdi uses in his early operas (and, in his own stylized versions, throughout his later work) the standard elements of Italian opera content of the period, referred to by the opera writer Julian Budden as the 'Code Rossini', after the composer who established through his work and popularity the accepted templates of these forms; they were also used by the composers dominant during Verdi's early career, Bellini, Donizetti and Saverio Mercadante. Amongst the essential elements are the aria, the duet, the ensemble, and the finale sequence of an act.[154] The aria format, centred on a soloist, typically involved three sections;  a slow introduction, marked typically cantabile or adagio, a tempo di mezzo which might involve chorus or other characters, and a cabaletta, an opportunity for bravura singing for the soloist. The duet was similarly formatted. Finales, covering climactic sequences of action, used the various forces of soloists, ensemble and chorus, usually culminating with an exciting stretto section. Verdi was to develop these and the other formulae of the generation preceding him with increasing sophistication during his career. [155][156]
+The operas of the early period show Verdi learning by doing and gradually establishing mastery over the different elements of opera. Oberto is poorly structured, and the orchestration of the first operas is generally simple, sometimes even basic.[157] The musicologist Richard Taruskin suggests "the most striking effect in the early Verdi operas, and the one most obviously allied to the mood of the Risorgimento, was the big choral number sung—crudely or sublimely, according to the ear of the beholder—in unison. The success of "Va, pensiero" in Nabucco (which Rossini approvingly denoted as "a grand aria sung by sopranos, contraltos, tenors and basses"), was replicated in the similar "O Signor, dal tetto natio" in I lombardi and in 1844 in the chorus "Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia" in Ernani, the battle hymn of the conspirators seeking freedom[158][159] In I due Foscari Verdi first uses recurring themes identified with main characters; here and in future operas the accent moves away from the 'oratorio' characteristics of the first operas towards individual action and intrigue.[157]
+From this period onwards Verdi also develops his instinct for "tinta" (literally 'colour'), a term which he used for characterising elements of an individual opera score—Parker gives as an example "the rising 6th that begins so many lyric pieces in Ernani".[160] Macbeth, even in its original 1847 version, shows many original touches; characterization by key (the Macbeths themselves generally singing in sharp keys, the witches in flat keys),[160] a preponderance of minor key music, and highly original orchestration. In the 'dagger scene' and the duet following the murder of Duncan, the  forms transcend the 'Code Rossini' and propel the drama in a compelling fashion.[161] Verdi was to comment in 1868 that Rossini and his followers missed "the golden thread that binds all the parts together and, rather than a set of numbers without coherence, makes an opera". Tinta was for Verdi this "golden thread", an essential unifying factor in his works.[162]
+The writer David Kimbell states that in Luisa Miller and Stiffelio (the earliest operas of this period) there appears to be a "growing freedom in the large scale structure...and an acute attention to fine detail".[42] Others echo those feelings. Julian Budden expresses the impact of Rigoletto and its place in Verdi's output as follows: "Just after 1850 at the age of 38, Verdi closed the door on a period of Italian opera with Rigoletto. The so-called ottocento in music is finished. Verdi will continue to draw on certain of its forms for the next few operas, but in a totally new spirit."[163] One example of Verdi's wish to move away from "standard forms" appears in his feelings about the structure of Il trovatore. To his librettist, Cammarano, Verdi plainly states in a letter of April 1851 that if there were no standard forms—"cavatinas, duets, trios, choruses, finales, etc. ... and if you could avoid beginning with an opening chorus....", he would be quite happy. [164]
+Two external factors had their impacts on Verdi's compositions of this period. One is that with increasing reputation and financial security he no longer needed to commit himself to the productive treadmill, had more freedom to choose his own subjects, and had more time to develop them according to his own ideas. In the years 1849 to 1859 he wrote eight new operas, compared with fourteen in the previous ten years.[74]
+Another factor was the changed political situation; the failure of the 1848 revolutions led both to some diminution of the Risorgimento ethos (at least initially) and a significant increase in theatre censorship.[74]  This is reflected both in Verdi's choices of plots dealing more with personal relationships than political conflict, and in a (partly consequent) dramatic reduction in the operas of this period in the  number of choruses (of the type which had first made him famous)—not only are there on average 40% fewer choruses in the 'middle' period operas compared to the 'early' period', but whereas virtually all the 'early' operas commence with a chorus, only one (Luisa Miller) of the 'middle' period operas begin this way. Instead, Verdi experiments with a variety of means, e.g. a stage band (Rigoletto), an aria for bass (Stiffelio), a party scene (La traviata). Chusid also notes Verdi's increasing tendency to replace full-scale overtures with shorter orchestral introductions.[165] Parker comments that La traviata, the last opera of the 'middle' period,  is "again a new adventure. It gestures towards a level of 'realism'...the contemporary world of waltzes pervades the score, and the heroine's death from disease is graphically depicted in the  music."[166] Verdi's increasing command of musical highlighting of changing moods and relationships is exemplified in Act III of Rigoletto, where Duke's flippant song "La donna è mobile" is followed immediately by the quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore", contrasting the rapacious Duke and his inamorata with the (concealed) indignant Rigoletto and his grieving daughter. Taruskin asserts this is "the most famous ensemble Verdi ever composed".[167]
+Chusid notes Strepponi's description of the operas of the 1860s and 1870s as being "modern" whereas Verdi described the pre-1849 works as "the cavatina operas", as further indication that "Verdi became increasingly dissatisfied with the older, familiar conventions of his predecessors that he had adopted at the outset of his career,"[168] Parker sees a physical differentiation of the operas from Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) to Aida (1871) is that they are significantly longer, and with larger cast-lists, than previous works. They also reflect a shift towards the French genre of grand opera, notable in more colorful orchestration, counterpointing of serious and comic scenes, and greater spectacle.[169] The opportunities of transforming Italian opera by utilising such resources appealed to him. For a commission from the Paris Opéra he expressly demanded a libretto from Eugène Scribe, the favorite librettist of Meyerbeer, telling him: "I want—in fact, I must have—a grandiose, impassioned and original subject." The result was Les vêpres siciliennes, and the scenarios of Simon Boccanegra (1857), Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (1862), Don Carlos (1865) and Aida (1872) all meet the same criteria. Porter notes that Un ballo marks an almost complete synthesis of Verdi's style with the grand opera hallmarks, such that "huge spectacle is not mere decoration but essential to the drama...musical and theatrical lines remain taut [and] the characters still sing as warmly, passionately and personally as in Il trovatore."[170]
+When the composer Ferdinand Hiller asked Verdi whether he preferred Aida or Don Carlos, Verdi replied that Aida had "more bite and (if you'll forgive the word), more theatricality".[171] During the rehearsals for the Naples production of Aida Verdi amused himself by writing his only string quartet, a sprightly work which shows in its last movement that he had not lost the skill for fugue-writing that he had learned with Lavigna.[172]
+Verdi's three last major works continued to show new development in conveying drama and emotion. The first to appear, in 1874 was his Requiem, scored for operatic forces but by no means an "opera in ecclesiastical dress" (the words in which Hans von Bülow condemned it before even hearing it).[173] Although in the Requiem Verdi puts to use many of the techniques he learned in opera, its musical forms and emotions are not those of the stage.[174] Verdi's tone painting at the opening of the Requiem is vividly described by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti,  writing in 1941: "in [the words] murmured by an invisible crowd over the slow swaying of a few simple chords, you straightaway sense the fear and sadness of a vast multitude before the mystery of death. In the [following] Et lux perpetuum the melody spreads it wings...before falling back on itself...you hear a sigh for consolation and eternal peace."[175]
+By the time Otello premièred in 1887, more than 15 years after Aida, the operas of Verdi's (predeceased) contemporary Richard Wagner had begun their ascendancy in popular taste, and many sought or identified Wagnerian aspects in Verdi's latest composition.[176] Budden points out that there is little in the music of Otello that relates either to the verismo opera of the younger Italian composers, and little if anything which can be construed as a homage to the New German School.[177] Nonetheless there is still much originality, building on the strengths which Verdi had already demonstrated; the powerful storm which opens the opera in medias res, the recollection of the love duet of Act I in Otello's dying words (more an aspect of tinta than leitmotif), imaginative touches of harmony in Iago's "Era la notte" (Act II).[178]
+Finally, six years later, appeared Falstaff, Verdi's only comedy apart from the early, ill-fated Un giorno di regno. In this work Roger Parker writes that:
+Although Verdi's operas brought him a popular following, not all contemporary critics approved of his work. The English critic Henry Chorley allowed in 1846 that "he is the only modern man...having a style—for better or worse", but found  all his output unacceptable. "[His] faults [are] grave ones, calculated to destroy and degrade taste beyond those of any Italian composer in the long list" wrote Chorley, whilst conceding that "howsoever incomplete may have been his training, howsoever mistaken his aspirations may have proved...he has aspired."[181] But by the time of Verdi's death, 55 years later, his reputation was assured, and the 1910 edition of Grove's Dictionary  pronounced him "one of the greatest and most popular opera composers of the nineteenth century".[182]
+Verdi had no pupils apart from Muzio and no school of composers sought to follow his style which, however much it reflected his own musical direction, was rooted in the period of his own youth. By the time of his death, verismo was the accepted style of young Italian composers. [183] The New York Metropolitan Opera frequently staged Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata during this period and featured Aida in every season from 1898 to 1945. Interest in the operas reawakened in mid-1920s Germany and this sparked a revival in England and elsewhere. From the 1930s onward there began to appear scholarly biographies and publications of documentation and correspondence.[184]
+In 1959 the Instituto di Studi Verdiani (from 1989 the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani) was founded in Parma and became a leading centre for research and publication of Verdi studies,[185] and in the 1970s the American Institute for Verdi Studies was founded at New York University.[186][187]
+Historians have  debated how political Verdi's operas were. In particular, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves (known as Va, pensiero) from the third act of the opera Nabucco was used an anthem for Italian patriots, who were seeking to unify their country and free it from foreign control in the years up to 1861 (the chorus's theme of exiles singing about their homeland, and its lines such as O mia patria, si bella e perduta / "O my country, so lovely and so lost" were thought to have resonated with many Italians).[188] Beginning in Naples in 1859 and spreading throughout Italy, the slogan "Viva VERDI" was used as an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Long live Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), referring to Victor Emmanuel II.[189][190] Marco Pizzo argues that after 1815, music became a political tool, and many songwriters expressed ideals of freedom and equality. Pizzo claims that Verdi was part of this movement, for his operas were inspired by the love of country, the struggle for Italian independence, and speak to the sacrifice of patriots and exiles.[191] George Martin claims Verdi was "the greatest artist" of the Risorgimento. "Throughout his work its values, its issues recur constantly, and he expressed them with great power".[192]
+But Mary Ann Smart argues that music critics at the time seldom mentioned any political themes.[193][194]  Likewise, Roger Parker argues that the political dimension of Verdi's operas was exaggerated by nationalistic historians looking for a hero in the late 19th century.[195]
+From the 1850s onwards, Verdi's operas displayed few patriotic themes because of the heavy censorship by the absolutist regime in power. Verdi later became disillusioned by politics, but he was personally active part in the political world of events of the Risorgimento and was elected to the first Italian parliament in 1861.[196]
+Three Italian conservatories, the Milan Conservatory[197] and those in Turin[198] and Como,[199] are named after Verdi, as are many Italian theatres.
+Verdi's hometown of Busseto displays Luigi Secchi's statue of a seated Verdi in 1913, next to the Teatro Verdi built in his honour in the 1850s.[200] It is one of many statues to the composer in Italy.[201] The Giuseppe Verdi Monument, a 1906 marble memorial, sculpted by Pasquale Civiletti, is located in Verdi Square in Manhattan, New York City. The monument includes a statue of Verdi himself and life-sized statues of four characters from his operas, (Aida, Otello,  and Falstaff from the operas of the same names, and Leonora from Il trovatore).[202]
+Verdi has been the subject of a number of film and stage works. These include the 1938 film directed by Carmine Gallone, Giuseppe Verdi, starring Fosco Giachetti;[203] the 1982 miniseries, The Life of Verdi, directed by Renato Castellani, where Verdi was played by Ronald Pickup, with narration by Burt Lancaster in the English version;[204] and the 1985 play After Aida, by Julian Mitchell (1985).[205] He is a character in the 2011 opera Risorgimento! by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification of 1861.[206]
+Verdi's operas are frequently staged around the world.[43] All of his operas are available in recordings in a number of versions,[207] and on DVD – Naxos Records offers a complete boxed set.[208]
+Modern productions may differ substantially from those originally envisaged by the composer. Jonathan Miller's 1982 version of Rigoletto for English National Opera, set in the world of modern American mafiosi, received critical plaudits.[209] But the same company's staging in 2002 of Un ballo in maschera as A Masked Ball, directed by Calixto Bieito, including "satanic sex rituals, homosexual rape, [and] a demonic dwarf", got a general critical thumbs down.[210]
+Meanwhile, the music of Verdi can still evoke a range of cultural and political resonances. Excerpts from the Requiem were featured at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.[137] On 12 March 2011 during a performance of Nabucco at the Opera di Roma celebrating 150 years of Italian unification, the conductor Riccardo Muti paused after "Va pensiero" and turned to address the audience (which included the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi) to complain about cuts in state funding of culture; the audience then joined in a repeat of the chorus.[211][212] In 2014, the pop singer Katy Perry appeared at the Grammy Award wearing a dress designed by  Valentino, embroidered with the music of "Dell'invito trascorsa è già l'ora" from the start of La traviata.[213] The bicentenary of Verdi's birth in 2013 was celebrated in numerous events around the world, both in  performances and broadcasts.[214]

en/2211.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@

+Ice is water frozen into a solid state.[3][4] Depending on the presence of impurities such as particles of soil or bubbles of air, it can appear transparent or a more or less opaque bluish-white color.
+In the Solar System, ice is abundant and occurs naturally from as close to the Sun as Mercury to as far away as the Oort cloud objects. Beyond the Solar System, it occurs as interstellar ice. It is abundant on Earth's surface – particularly in the polar regions and above the snow line[5] – and, as a common form of precipitation and deposition, plays a key role in Earth's water cycle and climate. It falls as snowflakes and hail or occurs as frost, icicles or ice spikes and aggregates from snow as glaciers, ice sheets.
+Ice molecules can exhibit eighteen or more different phases (packing geometries) that depend on temperature and pressure. When water is cooled rapidly (quenching), up to three different types of amorphous ice can form depending on the history of its pressure and temperature. When cooled slowly correlated proton tunneling occurs below −253.15 °C (20 K, −423.67 °F) giving rise to macroscopic quantum phenomena. Virtually all the ice on Earth's surface and in its atmosphere is of a hexagonal crystalline structure denoted as ice Ih (spoken as "ice one h") with minute traces of cubic ice denoted as ice Ic. The most common phase transition to ice Ih occurs when liquid water is cooled below 0 °C (273.15 K, 32 °F) at standard atmospheric pressure. It may also be deposited directly by water vapor, as happens in the formation of frost. The transition from ice to water is melting and from ice directly to water vapor is sublimation.
+Ice is used in a variety of ways, including cooling, winter sports and ice sculpture.
+As a naturally occurring crystalline inorganic solid with an ordered structure, ice is considered to be a mineral.[8][9] It possesses a regular crystalline structure based on the molecule of water, which consists of a single oxygen atom covalently bonded to two hydrogen atoms, or H–O–H. However, many of the physical properties of water and ice are controlled by the formation of hydrogen bonds between adjacent oxygen and hydrogen atoms; while it is a weak bond, it is nonetheless critical in controlling the structure of both water and ice.
+An unusual property of water is that its solid form—ice frozen at atmospheric pressure—is approximately 8.3% less dense than its liquid form; this is equivalent to a volumetric expansion of 9%. The density of ice is 0.9167[1]–0.9168[2] g/cm3 at 0 °C and standard atmospheric pressure (101,325 Pa), whereas water has a density of 0.9998[1]–0.999863[2] g/cm3 at the same temperature and pressure. Liquid water is densest, essentially 1.00 g/cm3, at 4 °C and begins to lose its density as the water molecules begin to form the hexagonal crystals of ice as the freezing point is reached. This is due to hydrogen bonding dominating the intermolecular forces, which results in a packing of molecules less compact in the solid. Density of ice increases slightly with decreasing temperature and has a value of 0.9340 g/cm3 at −180 °C (93 K).[10]
+When water freezes, it increases in volume (about 9% for fresh water).[11] The effect of expansion during freezing can be dramatic, and ice expansion is a basic cause of freeze-thaw weathering of rock in nature and damage to building foundations and roadways from frost heaving. It is also a common cause of the flooding of houses when water pipes burst due to the pressure of expanding water when it freezes.
+The result of this process is that ice (in its most common form) floats on liquid water, which is an important feature in Earth's biosphere. It has been argued that without this property, natural bodies of water would freeze, in some cases permanently, from the bottom up,[12] resulting in a loss of bottom-dependent animal and plant life in fresh and sea water. Sufficiently thin ice sheets allow light to pass through while protecting the underside from short-term weather extremes such as wind chill. This creates a sheltered environment for bacterial and algal colonies. When sea water freezes, the ice is riddled with brine-filled channels which sustain sympagic organisms such as bacteria, algae, copepods and annelids, which in turn provide food for animals such as krill and specialised fish like the bald notothen, fed upon in turn by larger animals such as emperor penguins and minke whales.[13]
+When ice melts, it absorbs as much energy as it would take to heat an equivalent mass of water by 80 °C. During the melting process, the temperature remains constant at 0 °C. While melting, any energy added breaks the hydrogen bonds between ice (water) molecules. Energy becomes available to increase the thermal energy (temperature) only after enough hydrogen bonds are broken that the ice can be considered liquid water. The amount of energy consumed in breaking hydrogen bonds in the transition from ice to water is known as the heat of fusion.
+As with water, ice absorbs light at the red end of the spectrum preferentially as the result of an overtone of an oxygen–hydrogen (O–H) bond stretch. Compared with water, this absorption is shifted toward slightly lower energies. Thus, ice appears blue, with a slightly greener tint than liquid water. Since absorption is cumulative, the color effect intensifies with increasing thickness or if internal reflections cause the light to take a longer path through the ice.[14]
+Other colors can appear in the presence of light absorbing impurities, where the impurity is dictating the color rather than the ice itself. For instance, icebergs containing impurities (e.g., sediments, algae, air bubbles) can appear brown, grey or green.[14]
+Ice may be any one of the 18[15] known solid crystalline phases of water, or in an amorphous solid state at various densities.
+Most liquids under increased pressure freeze at higher temperatures because the pressure helps to hold the molecules together. However, the strong hydrogen bonds in water make it different: for some pressures higher than 1 atm (0.10 MPa), water freezes at a temperature below 0 °C, as shown in the phase diagram below. The melting of ice under high pressures is thought to contribute to the movement of glaciers.[16]
+Ice, water, and water vapour can coexist at the triple point, which is exactly 273.16 K (0.01 °C) at a pressure of 611.657 Pa.[17][18] The kelvin was in fact defined as 1/273.16 of the difference between this triple point and absolute zero,[19] though this definition changed in May 2019.[20] Unlike most other solids, ice is difficult to superheat. In an experiment, ice at −3 °C was superheated to about 17 °C for about 250 picoseconds.[21]
+Subjected to higher pressures and varying temperatures, ice can form in 18 separate known crystalline phases. With care, at least 15 of these phases (one of the known exceptions being ice X) can be recovered at ambient pressure and low temperature in metastable form.[22][23] The types are differentiated by their crystalline structure, proton ordering,[24] and density. There are also two metastable phases of ice under pressure, both fully hydrogen-disordered; these are IV and XII. Ice XII was discovered in 1996. In 2006, XIII and XIV were discovered.[25] Ices XI, XIII, and XIV are hydrogen-ordered forms of ices Ih, V, and XII respectively. In 2009, ice XV was found at extremely high pressures and −143 °C.[26] At even higher pressures, ice is predicted to become a metal; this has been variously estimated to occur at 1.55 TPa[27] or 5.62 TPa.[28]
+As well as crystalline forms, solid water can exist in amorphous states as amorphous ice (ASW) of varying densities. Water in the interstellar medium is dominated by amorphous ice, making it likely the most common form of water in the universe. Low-density ASW (LDA), also known as hyperquenched glassy water, may be responsible for noctilucent clouds on Earth and is usually formed by deposition of water vapor in cold or vacuum conditions. High-density ASW (HDA) is formed by compression of ordinary ice Ih or LDA at GPa pressures. Very-high-density ASW (VHDA) is HDA slightly warmed to 160K under 1–2 GPa pressures.
+In outer space, hexagonal crystalline ice (the predominant form found on Earth) is extremely rare. Amorphous ice is more common; however, hexagonal crystalline ice can be formed by volcanic action.[29]
+Ice from a theorized superionic water may possess two crystalline structures.  At pressures in excess of 500,000 bars (7,300,000 psi) such superionic ice would take on a body-centered cubic structure.  However, at pressures in excess of 1,000,000 bars (15,000,000 psi) the structure may shift to a more stable face-centered cubic lattice.[30]
+The low coefficient of friction ("slipperiness") of ice has been attributed to the pressure of an object coming into contact with the ice, melting a thin layer of the ice and allowing the object to glide across the surface.[42] For example, the blade of an ice skate, upon exerting pressure on the ice, would melt a thin layer, providing lubrication between the ice and the blade. This explanation, called "pressure melting", originated in the 19th century. It, however, did not account for skating on ice temperatures lower than −4 °C (25 °F; 269 K), which is often skated upon.
+A second theory describing the coefficient of friction of ice suggested that ice molecules at the interface cannot properly bond with the molecules of the mass of ice beneath (and thus are free to move like molecules of liquid water). These molecules remain in a semi-liquid state, providing lubrication regardless of pressure against the ice exerted by any object. However, the significance of this hypothesis is disputed by experiments showing a high coefficient of friction for ice using atomic force microscopy.[43]
+A third theory is "friction heating", which suggests that friction of the material is the cause of the ice layer melting. However, this theory does not sufficiently explain why ice is slippery when standing still even at below-zero temperatures.[42]
+A comprehensive theory of ice friction takes into account all the above-mentioned friction mechanisms.[44] This model allows quantitative estimation of the friction coefficient of ice against various materials as a function of temperature and sliding speed. In typical conditions related to winter sports and tires of a vehicle on ice, melting of a thin ice layer due to the frictional heating is the primary reason for the slipperiness.  The mechanism controlling the frictional properties of ice is still an active area of scientific study.[45]
+The term that collectively describes all of the parts of the Earth's surface where water is in frozen form is the cryosphere. Ice is an important component of the global climate, particularly in regard to the water cycle. Glaciers and snowpacks are an important storage mechanism for fresh water; over time, they may sublimate or melt. Snowmelt is an important source of seasonal fresh water. The World Meteorological Organization defines several kinds of ice depending on origin, size, shape, influence and so on.[46] Clathrate hydrates are forms of ice that contain gas molecules trapped within its crystal lattice.
+Ice that is found at sea may be in the form of drift ice floating in the water, fast ice fixed to a shoreline or anchor ice if attached to the sea bottom. Ice which calves (breaks off) from an ice shelf or glacier may become an iceberg. Sea ice can be forced together by currents and winds to form pressure ridges up to 12 metres (39 ft) tall. Navigation through areas of sea ice occurs in openings called "polynyas" or "leads" or requires the use of a special ship called an "icebreaker".
+Ice on land ranges from the largest type called an "ice sheet" to smaller ice caps and ice fields to glaciers and ice streams to the snow line and snow fields.
+Aufeis is layered ice that forms in Arctic and subarctic stream valleys. Ice, frozen in the stream bed, blocks normal groundwater discharge, and causes the local water table to rise, resulting in water discharge on top of the frozen layer. This water then freezes, causing the water table to rise further and repeat the cycle. The result is a stratified ice deposit, often several meters thick.
+Freezing rain is a type of winter storm called an ice storm where rain falls and then freezes producing a glaze of ice. Ice can also form icicles, similar to stalactites in appearance, or stalagmite-like forms as water drips and re-freezes.
+The term "ice dam" has three meanings (others discussed below). On structures, an ice dam is the buildup of ice on a sloped roof which stops melt water from draining properly and can cause damage from water leaks in buildings.
+Ice which forms on moving water tends to be less uniform and stable than ice which forms on calm water. Ice jams (sometimes called "ice dams"), when broken chunks of ice pile up, are the greatest ice hazard on rivers. Ice jams can cause flooding, damage structures in or near the river, and damage vessels on the river. Ice jams can cause some hydropower industrial facilities to completely shut down. An ice dam is a blockage from the movement of a glacier which may produce a proglacial lake. Heavy ice flows in rivers can also damage vessels and require the use of an icebreaker to keep navigation possible.
+Ice discs are circular formations of ice surrounded by water in a river.[47]
+Pancake ice is a formation of ice generally created in areas with less calm conditions.
+Ice forms on calm water from the shores, a thin layer spreading across the surface, and then downward. Ice on lakes is generally four types: primary, secondary, superimposed and agglomerate.[48][49] Primary ice forms first. Secondary ice forms below the primary ice in a direction parallel to the direction of the heat flow. Superimposed ice forms on top of the ice surface from rain or water which seeps up through cracks in the ice which often settles when loaded with snow.
+Shelf ice occurs when floating pieces of ice are driven by the wind piling up on the windward shore.
+Candle ice is a form of rotten ice that develops in columns perpendicular to the surface of a lake.
+Rime is a type of ice formed on cold objects when drops of water crystallize on them. This can be observed in foggy weather, when the temperature drops during the night. Soft rime contains a high proportion of trapped air, making it appear white rather than transparent, and giving it a density about one quarter of that of pure ice. Hard rime is comparatively dense.
+Ice pellets are a form of precipitation consisting of small, translucent balls of ice. This form of precipitation is also referred to as "sleet" by the United States National Weather Service.[50] (In British English "sleet" refers to a mixture of rain and snow.) Ice pellets are usually smaller than hailstones.[51] They often bounce when they hit the ground, and generally do not freeze into a solid mass unless mixed with freezing rain. The METAR code for ice pellets is PL.[52]
+Ice pellets form when a layer of above-freezing air is located between 1,500 and 3,000 metres (4,900 and 9,800 ft) above the ground, with sub-freezing air both above and below it. This causes the partial or complete melting of any snowflakes falling through the warm layer. As they fall back into the sub-freezing layer closer to the surface, they re-freeze into ice pellets. However, if the sub-freezing layer beneath the warm layer is too small, the precipitation will not have time to re-freeze, and freezing rain will be the result at the surface. A temperature profile showing a warm layer above the ground is most likely to be found in advance of a warm front during the cold season,[53] but can occasionally be found behind a passing cold front.
+Like other precipitation, hail forms in storm clouds when supercooled water droplets freeze on contact with condensation nuclei, such as dust or dirt. The storm's updraft blows the hailstones to the upper part of the cloud. The updraft dissipates and the hailstones fall down, back into the updraft, and are lifted up again. Hail has a diameter of 5 millimetres (0.20 in) or more.[54] Within METAR code, GR is used to indicate larger hail, of a diameter of at least 6.4 millimetres (0.25 in) and GS for smaller.[52] Stones just larger than golf ball-sized are one of the most frequently reported hail sizes.[55] Hailstones can grow to 15 centimetres (6 in) and weigh more than 0.5 kilograms (1.1 lb).[56] In large hailstones, latent heat released by further freezing may melt the outer shell of the hailstone. The hailstone then may undergo 'wet growth', where the liquid outer shell collects other smaller hailstones.[57] The hailstone gains an ice layer and grows increasingly larger with each ascent. Once a hailstone becomes too heavy to be supported by the storm's updraft, it falls from the cloud.[58]
+Hail forms in strong thunderstorm clouds, particularly those with intense updrafts, high liquid water content, great vertical extent, large water droplets, and where a good portion of the cloud layer is below freezing 0 °C (32 °F).[54] Hail-producing clouds are often identifiable by their green coloration.[59][60] The growth rate is maximized at about −13 °C (9 °F), and becomes vanishingly small much below −30 °C (−22 °F) as supercooled water droplets become rare. For this reason, hail is most common within continental interiors of the mid-latitudes, as hail formation is considerably more likely when the freezing level is below the altitude of 11,000 feet (3,400 m).[61] Entrainment of dry air into strong thunderstorms over continents can increase the frequency of hail by promoting evaporational cooling which lowers the freezing level of thunderstorm clouds giving hail a larger volume to grow in. Accordingly, hail is actually less common in the tropics despite a much higher frequency of thunderstorms than in the mid-latitudes because the atmosphere over the tropics tends to be warmer over a much greater depth. Hail in the tropics occurs mainly at higher elevations.[62]
+Snow crystals form when tiny supercooled cloud droplets (about 10 μm in diameter) freeze. These droplets are able to remain liquid at temperatures lower than −18 °C (255 K; 0 °F), because to freeze, a few molecules in the droplet need to get together by chance to form an arrangement similar to that in an ice lattice; then the droplet freezes around this "nucleus." Experiments show that this "homogeneous" nucleation of cloud droplets only occurs at temperatures lower than −35 °C (238 K; −31 °F).[63] In warmer clouds an aerosol particle or "ice nucleus" must be present in (or in contact with) the droplet to act as a nucleus. Our understanding of what particles make efficient ice nuclei is poor – what we do know is they are very rare compared to that cloud condensation nuclei on which liquid droplets form. Clays, desert dust and biological particles may be effective,[64] although to what extent is unclear. Artificial nuclei are used in cloud seeding.[65] The droplet then grows by condensation of water vapor onto the ice surfaces.
+So-called "diamond dust", also known as ice needles or ice crystals, forms at temperatures approaching −40 °C (−40 °F) due to air with slightly higher moisture from aloft mixing with colder, surface-based air.[66] The METAR identifier for diamond dust within international hourly weather reports is IC.[52]
+Ablation of ice refers to both its melting and its dissolution.
+In fresh ambient melting describes a phase transition from solid to liquid.
+To melt ice means breaking the hydrogen bonds between the water molecules. The ordering of the molecules in the solid breaks down to a less ordered state and the solid melts to become a liquid. This is achieved by increasing the internal energy of the ice beyond the melting point. When ice melts it absorbs as much energy as would be required to heat an equivalent amount of water by 80 °C. While melting, the temperature of the ice surface remains constant at 0 °C. The velocity of the melting process depends on the efficiency of the energy exchange process. An ice surface in fresh water melts solely by free convection with a velocity that depends linearly on the water temperature, T∞, when T∞ is less than 3.98 °C, and superlinearly when T∞ is equal to or greater than 3.98 °C, with the rate being proportional to (T∞ − 3.98 °C)α, with α = 5/3 for T∞ much greater than 8 °C, and α = 4/3 for in between temperatures T∞.[67]
+In salty ambient conditions, dissolution rather than melting often causes the ablation of ice. For example, the temperature of the Arctic Ocean is generally below the melting point of ablating sea ice. The phase transition from solid to liquid is achieved by mixing salt and water molecules, similar to the dissolution of sugar in water, even though the water temperature is far below the melting point of the sugar. Hence dissolution is rate limited by salt transport whereas melting can occur at much higher rates that are characteristic for heat transport.[68]
+Humans have used ice for cooling and food preservation for centuries, relying on harvesting natural ice in various forms and then transitioning to the mechanical production of the material. Ice also presents a challenge to transportation in various forms and a setting for winter sports.
+Ice has long been valued as a means of cooling. In 400 BC Iran, Persian engineers had already mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert. The ice was brought in during the winters from nearby mountains in bulk amounts, and stored in specially designed, naturally cooled refrigerators, called yakhchal (meaning ice storage). This was a large underground space (up to 5000 m3) that had thick walls (at least two meters at the base) made of a special mortar called sarooj, composed of sand, clay, egg whites, lime, goat hair, and ash in specific proportions, and which was known to be resistant to heat transfer. This mixture was thought to be completely water impenetrable. The space often had access to a qanat, and often contained a system of windcatchers which could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels on summer days. The ice was used to chill treats for royalty.
+There were thriving industries in 16th–17th century England whereby low-lying areas along the Thames Estuary were flooded during the winter, and ice harvested in carts and stored inter-seasonally in insulated wooden houses as a provision to an icehouse often located in large country houses, and widely used to keep fish fresh when caught in distant waters. This was allegedly copied by an Englishman who had seen the same activity in China. Ice was imported into England from Norway on a considerable scale as early as 1823.[69]
+In the United States, the first cargo of ice was sent from New York City to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1799,[69] and by the first half of the 19th century, ice harvesting had become big business. Frederic Tudor, who became known as the "Ice King", worked on developing better insulation products for the long distance shipment of ice, especially to the tropics; this became known as the ice trade.
+Trieste sent ice to Egypt, Corfu, and Zante; Switzerland sent it to France; and Germany sometimes was supplied from Bavarian lakes.[69] The Hungarian Parliament building used ice harvested in the winter from Lake Balaton for air conditioning.
+Ice houses were used to store ice formed in the winter, to make ice available all year long, and early refrigerators were known as iceboxes, because they had a block of ice in them. In many cities, it was not unusual to have a regular ice delivery service during the summer. The advent of artificial refrigeration technology has since made delivery of ice obsolete.
+Ice is still harvested for ice and snow sculpture events. For example, a swing saw is used to get ice for the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival each year from the frozen surface of the Songhua River.[70]
+Ice is now produced on an industrial scale, for uses including food storage and processing, chemical manufacturing, concrete mixing and curing, and consumer or packaged ice.[71] Most commercial icemakers produce three basic types of fragmentary ice: flake, tubular and plate, using a variety of techniques.[71] Large batch ice makers can produce up to 75 tons of ice per day.[72] In 2002, there were 426 commercial ice-making companies in the United States, with a combined value of shipments of $595,487,000.[73] Home refrigerators can also make ice with a built in icemaker, which will typically make ice cubes or crushed ice. Stand-alone icemaker units that make ice cubes are often called ice machines.
+Ice can present challenges to safe transportation on land, sea and in the air.
+Ice forming on roads is a dangerous winter hazard. Black ice is very difficult to see, because it lacks the expected frosty surface. Whenever there is freezing rain or snow which occurs at a temperature near the melting point, it is common for ice to build up on the windows of vehicles. Driving safely requires the removal of the ice build-up. Ice scrapers are tools designed to break the ice free and clear the windows, though removing the ice can be a long and laborious process.
+Far enough below the freezing point, a thin layer of ice crystals can form on the inside surface of windows. This usually happens when a vehicle has been left alone after being driven for a while, but can happen while driving, if the outside temperature is low enough. Moisture from the driver's breath is the source of water for the crystals. It is troublesome to remove this form of ice, so people often open their windows slightly when the vehicle is parked in order to let the moisture dissipate, and it is now common for cars to have rear-window defrosters to solve the problem. A similar problem can happen in homes, which is one reason why many colder regions require double-pane windows for insulation.
+When the outdoor temperature stays below freezing for extended periods, very thick layers of ice can form on lakes and other bodies of water, although places with flowing water require much colder temperatures. The ice can become thick enough to drive onto with automobiles and trucks. Doing this safely requires a thickness of at least 30 cm (one foot).
+For ships, ice presents two distinct hazards. Spray and freezing rain can produce an ice build-up on the superstructure of a vessel sufficient to make it unstable, and to require it to be hacked off or melted with steam hoses. And icebergs – large masses of ice floating in water (typically created when glaciers reach the sea) – can be dangerous if struck by a ship when underway. Icebergs have been responsible for the sinking of many ships, the most famous being the Titanic. For harbors near the poles, being ice-free is an important advantage. Ideally, all year long. Examples are Murmansk (Russia), Petsamo (Russia, formerly Finland) and Vardø (Norway). Harbors which are not ice-free are opened up using icebreakers.
+For aircraft, ice can cause a number of dangers. As an aircraft climbs, it passes through air layers of different temperature and humidity, some of which may be conducive to ice formation. If ice forms on the wings or control surfaces, this may adversely affect the flying qualities of the aircraft. During the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic, the British aviators Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown encountered such icing conditions – Brown left the cockpit and climbed onto the wing several times to remove ice which was covering the engine air intakes of the Vickers Vimy aircraft they were flying.
+One vulnerability effected by icing that is associated with reciprocating internal combustion engines is the carburetor. As air is sucked through the carburetor into the engine, the local air pressure is lowered, which causes adiabatic cooling. Thus, in humid near-freezing conditions, the carburetor will be colder, and tend to ice up. This will block the supply of air to the engine, and cause it to fail. For this reason, aircraft reciprocating engines with carburetors are provided with carburetor air intake heaters. The increasing use of fuel injection—which does not require carburetors—has made "carb icing" less of an issue for reciprocating engines.
+Jet engines do not experience carb icing, but recent evidence indicates that they can be slowed, stopped, or damaged by internal icing in certain types of atmospheric conditions much more easily than previously believed. In most cases, the engines can be quickly restarted and flights are not endangered, but research continues to determine the exact conditions which produce this type of icing, and find the best methods to prevent, or reverse it, in flight.
+Ice also plays a central role in winter recreation and in many sports such as ice skating, tour skating, ice hockey, bandy, ice fishing, ice climbing, curling, broomball and sled racing on bobsled, luge and skeleton. Many of the different sports played on ice get international attention every four years during the Winter Olympic Games.
+A sort of sailboat on blades gives rise to ice yachting. Another sport is ice racing, where drivers must speed on lake ice, while also controlling the skid of their vehicle (similar in some ways to dirt track racing). The sport has even been modified for ice rinks.
+The solid phases of several other volatile substances are also referred to as ices; generally a volatile is classed as an ice if its melting point lies above or around 100 K. The best known example is dry ice, the solid form of carbon dioxide.
+A "magnetic analogue" of ice is also realized in some insulating magnetic materials in which the magnetic moments mimic the position of protons in water ice and obey energetic constraints similar to the Bernal-Fowler ice rules arising from the geometrical frustration of the proton configuration in water ice. These materials are called spin ice.

en/2212.html.txt ADDED Viewed

	@@ -0,0 +1,139 @@

+A glacier (US:  /ˈɡleɪʃər/ or UK: /ˈɡlæsiər, ˈɡleɪsiər/) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation (melting and sublimation) over many years, often centuries. Glaciers slowly deform and flow under stresses induced by their weight, creating crevasses, seracs, and other distinguishing features. They also abrade rock and debris from their substrate to create landforms such as cirques and moraines. Glaciers form only on land and are distinct from the much thinner sea ice and lake ice that form on the surface of bodies of water.
+On Earth, 99% of glacial ice is contained within vast ice sheets (also known as "continental glaciers") in the polar regions, but glaciers may be found in mountain ranges on every continent including Oceania's high-latitude oceanic island countries such as New Zealand. Between latitudes 35°N and 35°S, glaciers occur only in the Himalayas, Andes, and a few high mountains in East Africa, Mexico, New Guinea and on Zard Kuh in Iran.[1] With more than 7,000, Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere except the polar regions.[2] Glaciers cover about 10% of Earth's land surface. Continental glaciers cover nearly 13 million km2 (5 million sq mi) or about 98% of Antarctica's 13.2 million km2 (5.1 million sq mi), with an average thickness of 2,100 m (7,000 ft). Greenland and Patagonia also have huge expanses of continental glaciers.[3] The volume of glaciers, not including the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, has been estimated at 170,000 km3.[4]
+Glacial ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth.[5]  Many glaciers from temperate, alpine and seasonal polar climates store water as ice during the colder seasons and release it later in the form of meltwater as warmer summer temperatures cause the glacier to melt, creating a water source that is especially important for plants, animals and human uses when other sources may be scant. Within high-altitude and Antarctic environments, the seasonal temperature difference is often not sufficient to release meltwater.
+Since glacial mass is affected by long-term climatic changes, e.g., precipitation, mean temperature, and cloud cover, glacial mass changes are considered among the most sensitive indicators of climate change and are a major source of variations in sea level.
+A large piece of compressed ice, or a glacier, appears blue, as large quantities of water appear blue. This is because water molecules absorb other colors more efficiently than blue. The other reason for the blue color of glaciers is the lack of air bubbles. Air bubbles, which give a white color to ice, are squeezed out by pressure increasing the density of the created ice.
+The word glacier is a loanword from French and goes back, via Franco-Provençal, to the Vulgar Latin glaciārium, derived from the Late Latin glacia, and ultimately Latin glaciēs, meaning "ice".[6] The processes and features caused by or related to glaciers are referred to as glacial. The process of glacier establishment, growth and flow is called glaciation. The corresponding area of study is called glaciology. Glaciers are important components of the global cryosphere.
+Ice calving from the terminus of the Perito Moreno Glacier in western Patagonia, Argentina.
+The Aletsch Glacier, the largest glacier of the Alps, in Switzerland.
+The Quelccaya Ice Cap is the second-largest glaciated area in the tropics, in Peru.
+Glaciers are categorized by their morphology, thermal characteristics, and behavior. Alpine glaciers form on the crests and slopes of mountains. A glacier that fills a valley is called a valley glacier, or alternatively an alpine glacier or mountain glacier.[7] A large body of glacial ice astride a mountain, mountain range, or volcano is termed an ice cap or ice field.[8] Ice caps have an area less than 50,000 km2 (19,000 sq mi) by definition.
+Glacial bodies larger than 50,000 km2 (19,000 sq mi) are called ice sheets or continental glaciers.[9] Several kilometers deep, they obscure the underlying topography. Only nunataks protrude from their surfaces. The only extant ice sheets are the two that cover most of Antarctica and Greenland.[10] They contain vast quantities of fresh water, enough that if both melted, global sea levels would rise by over 70 m (230 ft).[11] Portions of an ice sheet or cap that extend into water are called ice shelves; they tend to be thin with limited slopes and reduced velocities.[12]  Narrow, fast-moving sections of an ice sheet are called ice streams.[13][14] In Antarctica, many ice streams drain into large ice shelves. Some drain directly into the sea, often with an ice tongue, like Mertz Glacier.
+Tidewater glaciers are glaciers that terminate in the sea, including most glaciers flowing from Greenland, Antarctica, Baffin and Ellesmere Islands in Canada, Southeast Alaska, and the Northern and Southern Patagonian Ice Fields. As the ice reaches the sea, pieces break off, or calve, forming icebergs. Most tidewater glaciers calve above sea level, which often results in a tremendous impact as the iceberg strikes the water. Tidewater glaciers undergo centuries-long cycles of advance and retreat that are much less affected by climate change than those of other glaciers.[15]
+Mouth of the Schlatenkees Glacier near Innergschlöß, Austria.
+The Grotta del Gelo is a cave of Etna volcano, the southernmost glacier in Europe.
+Sightseeing boat in front of a tidewater glacier, Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska.
+Thermally, a temperate glacier is at melting point throughout the year, from its surface to its base. The ice of a polar glacier is always below the freezing point from the surface to its base, although the surface snow pack may experience seasonal melting. A subpolar glacier includes both temperate and polar ice, depending on depth beneath the surface and position along the length of the glacier. In a similar way, the thermal regime of a glacier is often described by its basal temperature. A cold-based glacier is below freezing at the ice-ground interface and is thus frozen to the underlying substrate. A warm-based glacier is above or at freezing at the interface and is able to slide at this contact.[16] This contrast is thought to a large extent to govern the ability of a glacier to effectively erode its bed, as sliding ice promotes plucking at rock from the surface below.[17] Glaciers which are partly cold-based and partly warm-based are known as polythermal.[16]
+Glaciers form where the accumulation of snow and ice exceeds ablation. A glacier usually originates from a landform called 'cirque' (or corrie or cwm) – a typically armchair-shaped geological feature (such as a depression between mountains enclosed by arêtes) – which collects and compresses through gravity the snow that falls into it. This snow collects and is compacted by the weight of the snow falling above it, forming névé. Further crushing of the individual snowflakes and squeezing the air from the snow turns it into "glacial ice". This glacial ice will fill the cirque until it "overflows" through a geological weakness or vacancy, such as the gap between two mountains. When the mass of snow and ice is sufficiently thick, it begins to move by a combination of surface slope, gravity, and pressure.  On steeper slopes, this can occur with as little as 15 m (50 ft) of snow-ice.
+In temperate glaciers, snow repeatedly freezes and thaws, changing into granular ice called firn. Under the pressure of the layers of ice and snow above it, this granular ice fuses into denser firn. Over a period of years, layers of firn undergo further compaction and become glacial ice. Glacier ice is slightly more dense than ice formed from frozen water because glacier ice contains fewer trapped air bubbles.
+Glacial ice has a distinctive blue tint because it absorbs some red light due to an overtone of the infrared OH stretching mode of the water molecule. Liquid water is blue for the same reason. The blue of glacier ice is sometimes misattributed to Rayleigh scattering of bubbles in the ice.[18]
+Gorner Glacier in Switzerland.
+A packrafter passes a wall of freshly exposed blue ice on Spencer Glacier, in Alaska. Glacial ice acts like a filter on light, and the more time light can spend traveling through ice, the bluer it becomes.
+A glacier cave located on the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina.
+A glacier originates at a location called its glacier head and terminates at its glacier foot, snout, or terminus.
+Glaciers are broken into zones based on surface snowpack and melt conditions.[19]  The ablation zone is the region where there is a net loss in glacier mass. The upper part of a glacier, where accumulation exceeds ablation, is called the accumulation zone. The equilibrium line separates the ablation zone and the accumulation zone; it is the contour where the amount of new snow gained by accumulation is equal to the amount of ice lost through ablation. In general, the accumulation zone accounts for 60–70% of the glacier's surface area, more if the glacier calves icebergs. Ice in the accumulation zone is deep enough to exert a downward force that erodes underlying rock.  After a glacier melts, it often leaves behind a bowl- or amphitheater-shaped depression that ranges in size from large basins like the Great Lakes to smaller mountain depressions known as cirques.
+The accumulation zone can be subdivided based on its melt conditions.
+The health of a glacier is usually assessed by determining the glacier mass balance or observing terminus behavior. Healthy glaciers have large accumulation zones, more than 60% of their area is snow-covered at the end of the melt season, and they have a terminus with vigorous flow.
+Following the Little Ice Age's end around 1850, glaciers around the Earth have retreated substantially. A slight cooling led to the advance of many alpine glaciers between 1950 and 1985, but since 1985 glacier retreat and mass loss has become larger and increasingly ubiquitous.[20][21][22]
+Glaciers move, or flow, downhill by the force of gravity and the internal deformation of ice.[23] Ice behaves like a brittle solid until its thickness exceeds about 50 m (160 ft). The pressure on ice deeper than 50 m causes plastic flow. At the molecular level, ice consists of stacked layers of molecules with relatively weak bonds between layers. When the stress on the layer above exceeds the inter-layer binding strength, it moves faster than the layer below.[24]
+Glaciers also move through basal sliding. In this process, a glacier slides over the terrain on which it sits, lubricated by the presence of liquid water.  The water is created from ice that melts under high pressure from frictional heating.  Basal sliding is dominant in temperate or warm-based glaciers.
+Although evidence in favour of glacial flow was known by the early 19th century, other theories of glacial motion were advanced, such as the idea that meltwater, refreezing inside glaciers, caused the glacier to dilate and extend its length. As it became clear that glaciers behaved to some degree as if the ice were a viscous fluid, it was argued that "regelation", or the melting and refreezing of ice at a temperature lowered by the pressure on the ice inside the glacier, was what allowed the ice to deform and flow. James Forbes came up with the essentially correct explanation in the 1840s, although it was several decades before it was fully accepted.[25]
+The top 50 m (160 ft) of a glacier are rigid because they are under low pressure. This upper section is known as the fracture zone and moves mostly as a single unit over the plastic-flowing lower section. When a glacier moves through irregular terrain, cracks called crevasses develop in the fracture zone.  Crevasses form because of differences in glacier velocity.  If two rigid sections of a glacier move at different speeds or directions, shear forces cause them to break apart, opening a crevasse.  Crevasses are seldom more than 46 m (150 ft) deep but in some cases can be at least 300 m (1,000 ft) deep. Beneath this point, the plasticity of the ice prevents the formation of cracks.  Intersecting crevasses can create isolated peaks in the ice, called seracs.
+Crevasses can form in several different ways.  Transverse crevasses are transverse to flow and form where steeper slopes cause a glacier to accelerate.  Longitudinal crevasses form semi-parallel to flow where a glacier expands laterally.  Marginal crevasses form near the edge of the glacier, caused by the reduction in speed caused by friction of the valley walls.  Marginal crevasses are largely transverse to flow.  Moving glacier ice can sometimes separate from the stagnant ice above, forming a bergschrund.  Bergschrunds resemble crevasses but are singular features at a glacier's margins. Crevasses make travel over glaciers hazardous, especially when they are hidden by fragile snow bridges.
+Below the equilibrium line, glacial meltwater is concentrated in stream channels.  Meltwater can pool in proglacial lakes on top of a glacier or descend into the depths of a glacier via moulins. Streams within or beneath a glacier flow in englacial or sub-glacial tunnels.  These tunnels sometimes reemerge at the glacier's surface.[26]
+Ice cracks in the Titlis Glacier.
+Crossing a crevasse on the Easton Glacier, Mount Baker, in the North Cascades, United States.
+An exposed glacier tube that once transported water down the interior of the glacier.
+The speed of glacial displacement is partly determined by friction. Friction makes the ice at the bottom of the glacier move more slowly than ice at the top. In alpine glaciers, friction is also generated at the valley's side walls, which slows the edges relative to the center.
+Mean glacial speed varies greatly but is typically around 1 m (3 ft) per day.[27] There may be no motion in stagnant areas; for example, in parts of Alaska, trees can establish themselves on surface sediment deposits. In other cases, glaciers can move as fast as 20–30 m (70–100 ft) per day, such as in Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbræ.  Glacial speed is affected by factors such as slope, ice thickness, snowfall, longitudinal confinement, basal temperature, meltwater production, and bed hardness.
+A few glaciers have periods of very rapid advancement called surges. These glaciers exhibit normal movement until suddenly they accelerate, then return to their previous movement state.[28] These surges may be caused by failure of the underlying bedrock, the pooling of meltwater at the base of the glacier[29] — perhaps delivered from a supraglacial lake — or the simple accumulation of mass beyond a critical "tipping point".[30] Temporary rates up to 90 m (300 ft) per day have occurred when increased temperature or overlying pressure caused bottom ice to melt and water to accumulate beneath a glacier.
+In glaciated areas where the glacier moves faster than one km per year, glacial earthquakes occur.  These are large scale earthquakes that have seismic magnitudes as high as 6.1.[31][32]  The number of glacial earthquakes in Greenland peaks every year in July, August and September and increased rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. In a study using data from January 1993 through October 2005, more events were detected every year since 2002, and twice as many events were recorded in 2005 as there were in any other year.[32]
+Ogives (or Forbes bands)[33] are alternating wave crests and valleys that appear as dark and light bands of ice on glacier surfaces.  They are linked to seasonal motion of glaciers; the width of one dark and one light band generally equals the annual movement of the glacier.  Ogives are formed when ice from an icefall is severely broken up, increasing ablation surface area during summer.  This creates a swale and space for snow accumulation in the winter, which in turn creates a ridge.[34]  Sometimes ogives consist only of undulations or color bands and are described as wave ogives or band ogives.[35]
+Glaciers are present on every continent and in approximately fifty countries, excluding those (Australia, South Africa) that have glaciers only on distant subantarctic island territories. Extensive glaciers are found in Antarctica, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Iceland. Mountain glaciers are widespread, especially in the Andes, the Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, the Caucasus, Scandinavian mountains, and the Alps. Snezhnika glacier in Pirin Mountain, Bulgaria with a latitude of 41°46′09″ N is the southernmost glacial mass in Europe.[36] Mainland Australia currently contains no glaciers, although a small glacier on Mount Kosciuszko was present in the last glacial period.[37] In New Guinea, small, rapidly diminishing, glaciers are located on Puncak Jaya.[38] Africa has glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, on Mount Kenya, and in the Rwenzori Mountains.  Oceanic islands with glaciers include Iceland, several of the islands off the coast of Norway including Svalbard and Jan Mayen to the far north, New Zealand and the subantarctic islands of Marion, Heard, Grande Terre (Kerguelen) and Bouvet. During glacial periods of the Quaternary, Taiwan, Hawaii on Mauna Kea[39] and Tenerife also had large alpine glaciers, while the Faroe and Crozet Islands[40] were completely glaciated.
+The permanent snow cover necessary for glacier formation is affected by factors such as the degree of slope on the land, amount of snowfall and the winds. Glaciers can be found in all latitudes except from 20° to 27° north and south of the equator where the presence of the descending limb of the Hadley circulation lowers precipitation so much that with high insolation snow lines reach above 6,500 m (21,330 ft). Between 19˚N and 19˚S, however, precipitation is higher, and the mountains above 5,000 m (16,400 ft) usually have permanent snow.
+Even at high latitudes, glacier formation is not inevitable.  Areas of the Arctic, such as Banks Island, and the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica are considered polar deserts where glaciers cannot form because they receive little snowfall despite the bitter cold.  Cold air, unlike warm air, is unable to transport much water vapor.  Even during glacial periods of the Quaternary, Manchuria, lowland Siberia,[41] and central and northern Alaska,[42] though extraordinarily cold, had such light snowfall that glaciers could not form.[43][44]
+In addition to the dry, unglaciated polar regions, some mountains and volcanoes in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina are high (4,500 to 6,900 m or 14,800 to 22,600 ft) and cold, but the relative lack of precipitation prevents snow from accumulating into glaciers. This is because these peaks are located near or in the hyperarid Atacama Desert.
+Glaciers erode terrain through two principal processes: abrasion and plucking.
+As glaciers flow over bedrock, they soften and lift blocks of rock into the ice. This process, called plucking, is caused by subglacial water that penetrates fractures in the bedrock and subsequently freezes and expands. This expansion causes the ice to act as a lever that loosens the rock by lifting it. Thus, sediments of all sizes become part of the glacier's load. If a retreating glacier gains enough debris, it may become a rock glacier, like the Timpanogos Glacier in Utah.
+Abrasion occurs when the ice and its load of rock fragments slide over bedrock and function as sandpaper, smoothing and polishing the bedrock below.  The pulverized rock this process produces is called rock flour and is made up of rock grains between 0.002 and 0.00625 mm in size.  Abrasion leads to steeper valley walls and mountain slopes in alpine settings, which can cause avalanches and rock slides, which add even more material to the glacier. Glacial abrasion is commonly characterized by glacial striations.  Glaciers produce these when they contain large boulders that carve long scratches in the bedrock.  By mapping the direction of the striations, researchers can determine the direction of the glacier's movement.  Similar to striations are chatter marks, lines of crescent-shape depressions in the rock underlying a glacier.  They are formed by abrasion when boulders in the glacier are repeatedly caught and released as they are dragged along the bedrock.
+The rate of glacier erosion varies. Six factors control erosion rate:
+When the bedrock has frequent fractures on the surface, glacial erosion rates tend to increase as plucking is the main erosive force on the surface; when the bedrock has wide gaps between sporadic fractures, however, abrasion tends to be the dominant erosive form and glacial erosion rates become slow.[45] Glaciers in lower latitudes tend to be much more erosive than glaciers in higher latitudes, because they have more meltwater reaching the glacial base and facilitate sediment production and transport under the same moving speed and amount of ice.[46]
+Material that becomes incorporated in a glacier is typically carried as far as the zone of ablation before being deposited. Glacial deposits are of two distinct types:
+Larger pieces of rock that are encrusted in till or deposited on the surface are called "glacial erratics".  They range in size from pebbles to boulders, but as they are often moved great distances, they may be drastically different from the material upon which they are found.  Patterns of glacial erratics hint at past glacial motions.
+Glacial moraines are formed by the deposition of material from a glacier and are exposed after the glacier has retreated.  They usually appear as linear mounds of till, a non-sorted mixture of rock, gravel, and boulders within a matrix of fine powdery material. Terminal or end moraines are formed at the foot or terminal end of a glacier. Lateral moraines are formed on the sides of the glacier. Medial moraines are formed when two different glaciers merge and the lateral moraines of each coalesce to form a moraine in the middle of the combined glacier. Less apparent are ground moraines, also called glacial drift, which often blankets the surface underneath the glacier downslope from the equilibrium line. The term moraine is of French origin.  It was coined by peasants to describe alluvial embankments and rims found near the margins of glaciers in the French Alps. In modern geology, the term is used more broadly and is applied to a series of formations, all of which are composed of till. Moraines can also create moraine-dammed lakes.
+Drumlins are asymmetrical, canoe-shaped hills made mainly of till. Their heights vary from 15 to 50 meters, and they can reach a kilometer in length. The steepest side of the hill faces the direction from which the ice advanced (stoss), while a longer slope is left in the ice's direction of movement (lee). Drumlins are found in groups called drumlin fields or drumlin camps. One of these fields is found east of Rochester, New York; it is estimated to contain about 10,000 drumlins. Although the process that forms drumlins is not fully understood, their shape implies that they are products of the plastic deformation zone of ancient glaciers. It is believed that many drumlins were formed when glaciers advanced over and altered the deposits of earlier glaciers.
+Before glaciation, mountain valleys have a characteristic "V" shape, produced by eroding water. During glaciation, these valleys are often widened, deepened and smoothed to form a "U"-shaped glacial valley or glacial trough, as it is sometimes called.[47]  The erosion that creates glacial valleys truncates any spurs of rock or earth that may have earlier extended across the valley, creating broadly triangular-shaped cliffs called truncated spurs.  Within glacial valleys, depressions created by plucking and abrasion can be filled by lakes, called paternoster lakes.  If a glacial valley runs into a large body of water, it forms a fjord.
+Typically glaciers deepen their valleys more than their smaller tributaries. Therefore, when glaciers recede, the valleys of the tributary glaciers remain above the main glacier's depression and are called hanging valleys.
+At the start of a classic valley glacier is a bowl-shaped cirque, which has escarped walls on three sides but is open on the side that descends into the valley. Cirques are where ice begins to accumulate in a glacier.  Two glacial cirques may form back to back and erode their backwalls until only a narrow ridge, called an arête is left. This structure may result in a mountain pass.  If multiple cirques encircle a single mountain, they create pointed pyramidal peaks; particularly steep examples are called horns.
+Passage of glacial ice over an area of bedrock may cause the rock to be sculpted into a knoll called a roche moutonnée, or "sheepback" rock. Roches moutonnées may be elongated, rounded and asymmetrical in shape. They range in length from less than a meter to several hundred meters long.[48]  Roches moutonnées have a gentle slope on their up-glacier sides and a steep to vertical face on their down-glacier sides. The glacier abrades the smooth slope on the upstream side as it flows along, but tears rock fragments loose and carries them away from the downstream side via plucking.
+As the water that rises from the ablation zone moves away from the glacier, it carries fine eroded sediments with it.  As the speed of the water decreases, so does its capacity to carry objects in suspension. The water thus gradually deposits the sediment as it runs, creating an alluvial plain. When this phenomenon occurs in a valley, it is called a valley train. When the deposition is in an estuary, the sediments are known as bay mud. Outwash plains and valley trains are usually accompanied by basins known as "kettles". These are small lakes formed when large ice blocks that are trapped in alluvium melt and produce water-filled depressions. Kettle diameters range from 5 m to 13 km, with depths of up to 45 meters.  Most are circular in shape because the blocks of ice that formed them were rounded as they melted.[49]
+When a glacier's size shrinks below a critical point, its flow stops and it becomes stationary. Meanwhile, meltwater within and beneath the ice leaves stratified alluvial deposits. These deposits, in the forms of columns, terraces and clusters, remain after the glacier melts and are known as "glacial deposits". Glacial deposits that take the shape of hills or mounds are called kames. Some kames form when meltwater deposits sediments through openings in the interior of the ice. Others are produced by fans or deltas created by meltwater.  When the glacial ice occupies a valley, it can form terraces or kames along the sides of the valley. Long, sinuous glacial deposits are called eskers.  Eskers are composed of sand and gravel that was deposited by meltwater streams that flowed through ice tunnels within or beneath a glacier. They remain after the ice melts, with heights exceeding 100 meters and lengths of as long as 100 km.
+Very fine glacial sediments or rock flour is often picked up by wind blowing over the bare surface and may be deposited great distances from the original fluvial deposition site. These eolian loess deposits may be very deep, even hundreds of meters, as in areas of China and the Midwestern United States. Katabatic winds can be important in this process.
+Large masses, such as ice sheets or glaciers, can depress the crust of the Earth into the mantle.[50]  The depression usually totals a third of the ice sheet or glacier's thickness. After the ice sheet or glacier melts, the mantle begins to flow back to its original position, pushing the crust back up. This post-glacial rebound, which proceeds very slowly after the melting of the ice sheet or glacier, is currently occurring in measurable amounts in Scandinavia and the Great Lakes region of North America.
+A geomorphological feature created by the same process on a smaller scale is known as dilation-faulting. It occurs where previously compressed rock is allowed to return to its original shape more rapidly than can be maintained without faulting.  This leads to an effect similar to what would be seen if the rock were hit by a large hammer. Dilation faulting can be observed in recently de-glaciated parts of Iceland and Cumbria.
+The polar ice caps of Mars show geologic evidence of glacial deposits. The south polar cap is especially comparable to glaciers on Earth.[51] Topographical features and computer models indicate the existence of more glaciers in Mars' past.[52] At mid-latitudes, between 35° and 65° north or south, Martian glaciers are affected by the thin Martian atmosphere. Because of the low atmospheric pressure, ablation near the surface is solely caused by sublimation, not melting. As on Earth, many glaciers are covered with a layer of rocks which insulates the ice. A radar instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found ice under a thin layer of rocks in formations called lobate debris aprons (LDAs).[53][54][55][56][57]
+The pictures below illustrate how landscape features on Mars closely resemble those on the Earth.
+Romer Lake's Elephant Foot Glacier in the Earth's Arctic, as seen by Landsat 8.  This picture shows several glaciers that have the same shape as many features on Mars that are believed to also be glaciers.  The next three images from Mars show shapes similar to the Elephant Foot Glacier.
+Mesa in Ismenius Lacus quadrangle, as seen by CTX. Mesa has several glaciers eroding it. One of the glaciers is seen in greater detail in the next two images from HiRISE.  Image from Ismenius Lacus quadrangle.
+Glacier as seen by HiRISE under the HiWish program. Area in the rectangle is enlarged in the next photo. Zone of accumulation of snow at the top. Glacier is moving down valley, then spreading out on plain. Evidence for flow comes from the many lines on surface. Location is in Protonilus Mensae in Ismenius Lacus quadrangle.
+Enlargement of area in rectangle of the previous image. On Earth, the ridge would be called the terminal moraine of an alpine glacier. Picture taken with HiRISE under the HiWish program.  Image from Ismenius Lacus quadrangle.