title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The show details the ongoing trials of Angel, a vampire whose human soul was restored to him by a Romani curse as a punishment for the murder of one of their own. After more than a century of murder and the torture of innocents, Angel's restored soul torments him with guilt and remorse. Angel moves to Los Angeles, California, after it is clear that his doomed relationship with Buffy, the vampire slayer, cannot continue. During the majority of the show, he works as a private detective in L.A., where he and a variety of associates work to "help the helpless", restoring the faith and saving the souls of those who have lost their way. While he must also battle his own demonic nature, he typically battles with evil demons or humans allied to them, primarily related to Wolfram & Hart, a law firm supported by occult practices which is an extension of otherworldly demonic forces.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The series focuses on Angel (David Boreanaz), an Irish vampire who is over 240 years old. Angel was known as Angelus during his rampages across Europe, but was cursed with a soul, which gave him a conscience and guilt for centuries of murder and torture. He left "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" at the end of season 3 to move to Los Angeles in search of redemption.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: He soon finds himself assisted by Allen Francis Doyle (Glenn Quinn), another Irish character who is a half-human, half-demon who, although he comes across as a ne'er-do-well hustler, has a heroic side. Doyle serves to pass along the cryptic visions from The Powers That Be to Angel. They're soon joined by Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter), also a previous cast member of "Buffy." Formerly a popular high school cheerleader, Cordelia starts her tenure on the show as a more vain and self-centered personality, but grows over the course of the series into a hero. Cordelia acquires Doyle's visions via a shared kiss prior to Doyle's death. With the death of Doyle in the ninth episode of the show's first season, another character from the "Buffy" series makes the jump to its spinoff: Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alexis Denisof) joins the team under the brave guise of "rogue demon hunter," acting as comic relief and initially not well accepted. Over time, Wesley shows bravery and strength as well as some cold-blooded killing ability, like his colleague Rupert Giles, and grows into a leader.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: In season 2 of the show, the trio are joined by Charles Gunn (J. August Richards), a young demon hunter who must initially adjust to working with and for a vampire. At the end of season 2, they travel to the demon world Pylea, where they save Winifred "Fred" Burkle (Amy Acker), a young Texan physicist whose social skills have become stunted after five years' captivity; she later grows to become more outspoken. Season 3 saw the introduction of Connor (Vincent Kartheiser), the "miracle" human child of two vampires, Angel and Darla. Abducted into a Hell dimension as a baby, he is raised by Angel's enemy Daniel Holtz, and only a few weeks after he left comes back as a teenager and reluctantly comes to accept his lineage. Although introduced during season 2, Lorne (Andy Hallett) joins the team during season 3. An outgoing, pacifistic demon with prophetic and empathic abilities, Lorne's role is predominantly to support the team.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Season 5, the show's final season, introduces several new cast members, chief amongst them Spike (James Marsters), an old vampire ally/foe of Angel's who also starred in "Buffy." In this series, Spike reluctantly fights beside Angel as their rivalry continues—now tinged with Spike existing as another vampire with a soul, and by the romantic feelings that both of them have for Buffy Summers. One of the legendary Old Ones, Illyria (Amy Acker) starts off as an adversary of the team after taking over Fred's body, but comes to join the team as she must learn to cope with the changed world and the new emotions she feels as a result of taking over a human. Finally, there's Harmony Kendall (Mercedes McNab), another "Buffy" alumna and former friend of Cordelia who was turned into a vampire. Resembling the old personality of Cordelia, Harmony is grudgingly accepted by Angel as his secretary when he takes over the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram & Hart.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Many characters on "Angel" made recurring appearances. The two longest-running recurring characters are Lilah Morgan (Seasons 1–4) and Lindsey McDonald (Seasons 1, 2, and 5), appearing in 36 and 21 episodes, respectively; Lindsey is the only character besides Angel to appear in both the first and last episode of the series. Angel's sire Darla (Julie Benz), first seen in "Buffy", plays an expanded role on "Angel" and appears in 20 episodes over the course of the series. Elisabeth Röhm appears in 15 episodes (Seasons 1–2) as LAPD Detective Kate Lockley, a woman with an often-strained relationship with Angel.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Throughout the series, there were also guest appearances from "Buffy" characters, including main cast members Buffy Summers, Willow Rosenberg and Daniel "Oz" Osbourne. The rogue slayer Faith (Eliza Dushku) played an important part in episodes of Seasons 1, 2, and 4; Anne Steele and Andrew Wells also originated on "Buffy" and appeared in two or more "Angel" episodes. Whedon also used two actors from his cancelled television series "Firefly", Gina Torres and Adam Baldwin, to play Jasmine and Marcus Hamilton, respectively.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Much of "Angel" was shot on location in Los Angeles, where it is also set. "Los Angeles" are the first words spoken in the premiere episode, and the cityscape is the first image seen in the opening credits. Joss Whedon said, "It is set in Los Angeles because there are a lot of demons in L.A. and a wealth of stories to be told." Producer Marti Noxon has expanded on this explanation: "Los Angeles was the place that Joss Whedon picked for very specific reasons. There's a lot of preconceptions about what the place is, but there are a lot of truths. It's a pretty competitive, intense town, where a lot of lonely, isolated, and desperate people end up. It's a good place for monsters." Many episodes feature references to the city, and the opening episode of the second season features Lorne offering this observation of the city:


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: In the essay, "Los Angeles: The City of Angel" (from the essay collection, ""), Benjamin Jacob explores why Los Angeles in particular should be important to the series. Jacob suggests several explanations: first, the name connection ('City of Angels'); second, the double-sided nature, the "other side of the stereotypical sunshine city, Beach Boys and Walt Disney", "the place of pain, anonymity, alienation and broken dreams".; third, American noir was originally a "Los Angelian genre". "Angel" was originally conceived as supernatural noir. Noir had continued investigation of the "dark city, a place of regression and darkness as a counterpoint to the city's promise of progress and civilization" that had begun under William Blake and Charles Dickens.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: During Season 1, Angel Investigations is based in Angel's apartment. Actor Alexis Denisof, who played Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, said: "Angel had this dark, foreboding, underground cellar apartment with columns, with this antique furniture all around, and this pokey little office upstairs" These offices were blown up at the climax of the first season, and Angel Investigations found a new base in the episode "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Production designer Stuart Blatt outlined the new base: "An old hotel, something [the writers] could use to evoke the past of Los Angeles and some of Angel's history, something kind of creepy and spooky but not too dark because they didn't want something depressing, it's called the Hyperion Hotel. It's based on many hotels in Los Angeles... Angel lived in a larger suite in the hotel, like a honeymoon suite, the producers wanted Angel to have enough room to relax and get away from it all, do a little pondering, a little brooding, and a little research. Every once in a while, someone will come up to have a little conversation." In the final season, the team moves to the evil law firm, Wolfram & Hart.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Much like "Buffy", "Angel" is told in a serialized format, with each episode involving a self-contained story while contributing to a larger storyline. Unlike "Buffy", however, the season-long narratives are not marked by the rise and defeat of a powerful antagonist, commonly referred to as the "Big Bad" in the parent series. Instead, the overarching story of all five seasons of the series pitted Angel as the central player in a battle between the "good" Powers That Be and the "evil" law firm Wolfram & Hart and his possible role in a prophesied apocalypse. It mixes the complex, series-long storyline along with more stand-alone, villain-of-the-week episodes. The show blends different genres, including horror, fantasy, supernatural, and a combination of comedic and dramatic content.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Season 1 is mainly told in a "monster of the week" format, with each episode creating a self-contained story that took place around the title character. Later seasons became more serialized, where the majority of episodes contribute to a larger story arc that unfolded over many episodes. The most extreme example of this is season 4, in which almost every episode contributed to the main storyline, and often picked up exactly where the previous episode ended.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The series' narrative revolves around Angel and his colleagues, collectively making up the detective agency Angel Investigations, who fight against supernatural evils and work to "Help the helpless". A typical episode contains one or more villains, or supernatural phenomena that is thwarted or defeated, and one or more people in need of help, a few of them Angel and associates not being able to (including some main characters) since from episode one. Though elements and relationships are explored and ongoing subplots are included, the show focuses centrally on Angel and his road to redemption.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The most prominent monsters in the "Angel" bestiary are vampires, which are based on traditional myths, lore, and literary conventions. Angel and his companions fight a wide variety of demons, as well as ghosts, werewolves, zombies, and ethically unsound humans. They sometimes even save the world from annihilation by a combination of physical combat, magic, and detective-style investigation, and are guided by an extensive collection of ancient and mystical reference books. Visions from higher powers guide the group, and are received by Doyle and later Cordelia. Hand-to-hand combat is chiefly undertaken by Angel and later Gunn, though every member of Angel Investigations is combat-ready to some degree. Lorne is able to read peoples' destinies and intentions. Fred uses her scientific knowledge to contribute, whilst Wesley contributes his extensive knowledge of demonology and supernatural lore.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: At the start of the series, Angel has just moved to Los Angeles. He is soon visited by Doyle, a messenger sent to him on behalf of The Powers That Be, enigmatic and ancient forces that assist the side of good. Doyle receives visions that can guide Angel on his mission as a champion of humankind. Angel also encounters Cordelia Chase, who is trying to launch an acting career. The three group together to form Angel Investigations, a detective agency that hopes to "help the helpless". When Doyle dies in the episode "Hero", he passes on his "visions" to Cordelia with a kiss. Shortly thereafter, the ex-Watcher, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, joins the group. Meanwhile, the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart pay increasing attention to Angel. They tempt him toward darkness when they resurrect Darla, Angel's ex-lover and sire—killed by Angel in the first season of "Buffy" in the episode "Angel".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Charles Gunn, who was introduced toward the end of season 1 in the episode "War Zone," is a street-tough leader of a gang of vampire hunters. He is initially determined to kill Angel but slowly comes to accept him and join his cause throughout season 2. Wolfram & Hart's star lawyer Lindsey McDonald primes Darla as its weapon to bring down Angel. However, Darla is brought back as a human, not a vampire. But as a human, she suffers from a terminal case of syphilis—which she had contracted in her original life before being sired. Lindsey brings in Drusilla, a vampire originally sired by Angelus, to restore Darla to the cause of evil. Enraged by this, Angel begins to grow darker. He cuts himself off from his staff (secretly to keep them away from this kind of dark territory for their own sake) and attempts to go after the pair himself. In despair, Angel sleeps with Darla (cf. "Reprise") but the next morning, he has an epiphany; seeing the error of his ways, he banishes Darla and reunites with his group. When Cordelia vanishes, Lorne, the flamboyant demon owner of karaoke bar Caritas, reluctantly takes Angel and his crew to his home dimension, Pylea, to rescue her. They return with Winifred "Fred" Burkle, a former physics student who has been trapped in the dimension for five long years.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: To get over news of the death of his ex-girlfriend, Buffy, Angel spends three months in a monastery, where he encounters some demon monks and goes home frustrated in season 3. He returns to Los Angeles, as does Darla—now bearing his child. Daniel Holtz, an old enemy of both Angel and Darla, is resurrected by a demon to take revenge on the vampires that killed his family. The group is puzzled over what might be the first vampire birth. Darla sacrifices her life to save the life of her child, Connor. The gang is eager to care for the infant, but Wesley soon learns of a (false) frightening prophecy that suggests that Angel will murder his son. Feeling disconnected from the group, Wesley does not share this information and quietly kidnaps Connor. This backfires as he is attacked and the child is seized by Holtz and his protégée Justine. Wanting Angel to suffer the loss of a child as he did, Holtz escapes through a rip in the fabric of space to the dimension of Quor'Toth, and raises the boy as his own. Angel feels that his son is lost forever and tries to murder Wesley. Though he survives, Wesley is banished from the group. Weeks later, Connor returns, but because time moves faster in Quor'Toth, he is now a teenage boy, having been raised by Holtz. Tricking Angel into believing he needs to be the one to take Connor in, Holtz gives Angel a letter letting Connor know that he will be leaving and to trust Angel. Holtz gets Justine to kill him but ends up making it look like a vampire attack so Connor will assume the worst. Connor imprisons his birth father, Angel, in a casket and drops it to the bottom of the ocean. Cordelia's visions have been progressively getting worse, and she becomes part demon to make them easier on herself. Her old lover, the Groosalugg, comes back from Pylea to be with her but leaves her when he discovers that she instead loves Angel. Cordelia, having been approached by a seeming agent of the Powers That Be with an offer to become a Higher Being, ascends to a higher dimensional plane at season's end.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Despite his exile from his old friends, Wesley locates and frees Angel at the beginning of season four. A hellish Beast emerges and blocks out the sun over L.A. He then proceeds to kill the staff at Wolfram & Hart. Although the city survives, the sunlight seems to have been vanquished permanently. The team resorts to releasing Angel's soul, believing Angelus knows helpful information about the beast. Although the team takes safety precautions, Angelus is released from his cell by Cordelia, who is, at the time, under the influence of the soon to be born Jasmine. Luckily, they manage to restore Angel's soul, thanks to help from Faith and Willow. Their efforts, however, do not prevent the coming of Jasmine, who was indirectly responsible for the work of the Beast. Jasmine, it turns out, was formerly one of the Powers That Be and plans to solve all the world's problems by giving humanity total happiness through spiritual enslavement to her. She arrives in our world through manipulation of Cordelia and Connor, using them as a conduit into our world, eventually forcing Cordelia to fall into a coma. Fred is accidentally inoculated against Jasmine's spell by contact with her blood and frees the rest of the gang though they remain hopelessly outnumbered by thousands already entranced by Jasmine. Angel travels through a magic portal into a world previously visited by Jasmine to find a way of breaking her power over L.A.'s populace. By revealing her true name, they are able to break Jasmine's spell over everyone. Jasmine confronts Angel but is then killed by Connor. Connor is revealed never to have been under Jasmine's influence, but he went along for the sake of having a semblance of family and happiness. In the season finale, they are met by Lilah Morgan, the resurrected Head of Wolfram & Hart's Special Project Division, who congratulates them on preventing world peace, and says that as a token of their appreciation, Wolfram & Hart would like to give them the Los Angeles branch. To help save Cordelia and Connor, who has gone mad with confusion over losing everything, Angel reluctantly agrees.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: In season 5, the gang begins to settle into their new lives at Wolfram & Hart. Gunn undergoes a special cognitive procedure that transforms him into a brilliant lawyer. The group receives an amulet that resurrects a past companion of Angelus, the en-souled vampire Spike, initially as a ghost-like presence but later regains corporeal status due to the machinations of Lindsey McDonald in a surprise return. Cordelia, who has been in a coma, has "The Powers That Be" grant her one last request, in which she helps Angel get "back on track," then dies. Angel is briefly reunited with his son Connor, now in a new identity thanks to the agreement between Angel and Wolfram & Hart at the end of Season Four. Connor regains the memories of his former identity but doesn't acknowledge this to protect his new parents (though he later reveals to Angel that he does, in fact, remember his previous life). Fred finally declares her affections to Wesley, but shortly after is possessed by an ancient and powerful demon called Illyria. Wesley is devastated by the loss of Fred but agrees to help Illyria adjust to her new form and the unfamiliar world she's in. Angel, after getting one last vision from Cordelia before her death, infiltrates the Circle of the Black Thorn, a secret society responsible for engineering the Apocalypse, and plans to take them all out in a simultaneous, hard-hitting strike. Because this is probably a suicide mission, he tells each of his friends to spend the day as if it were their last. That night, the team launches its attack on the Circle, dividing up their targets. When Wesley is fatally stabbed, Illyria, concerned for his safety, arrives at his side after killing her targets but is unable to save him. Illyria asks Wesley if he'd like her to assume the form of Fred, and Wesley agrees, allowing him to say goodbye to the woman he loved. Lorne leaves and disappears into the night, his innocence destroyed after fulfilling Angel's last order to kill Lindsey, the former Wolfram & Hart lawyer who had turned his back on the firm. Angel confronts Senior Partners' new liaison Marcus Hamilton and defeats him with help from Connor.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Once the Circle has been dismantled, Angel and the surviving members of his gang rendezvous in the alley behind the Hyperion Hotel. Illyria arrives with news of Wesley's death and feels the need to retaliate in her anger and grief. Spike also arrives, triumphant about his successful mission and hungry for further violent fighting. Gunn emerges, staggering from a serious stomach wound, but ready to fight. The survivors wait as the Senior Partners' army of warriors, giants, and a dragon approaches. Angel and his crew prepare for the upcoming battle, with Angel saying, "Personally, I kind of want to slay the dragon." The series then ends with Angel saying, "Let's go to work," after which he and his team attack the army of monsters head-on.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Co-producer Greenwalt points out, "There's no denying that "Angel" grew out of "Buffy"." Several years before "Angel" debuted, Joss Whedon developed the concept behind "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to invert the Hollywood formula of "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie." The character Angel was first seen in the first episode and became a regular, appearing in the opening credits during seasons 2 and 3. According to the fictional universe first established by "Buffy", the 'Buffyverse', Angel was born in 18th-century Ireland; after being turned into a soulless, immortal vampire, he became legendary for his evil acts, until a band of wronged Gypsies punished him by restoring his soul, overwhelming him with guilt. Angel eventually set out on a path of redemption, hoping that he could make up for his past through good deeds. In "Buffy"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s Season Three finale, he leaves Sunnydale for L.A. to continue his atonement without Buffy. Whedon believed that "Angel was the one character who was bigger than life in the same way that Buffy was, a kind of superhero." Whedon has compared the series to its parent: "It's a little bit more straightforward action show and a little bit more of a guys' show."


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: While the central concept behind "Buffy" was "high school as a horror movie" in small-town America, co-creators David Greenwalt and Whedon were looking to make "Angel" into a different "gritty, urban show." Whedon explained, "We wanted a much darker show, darker in tone. It's set in Los Angeles because there are a lot of demons in L.A. and a wealth of stories to be told. We also wanted to take the show a little older and have the characters deal with demons in a much different way. Buffy is always the underdog trying to save the world, but Angel is looking for redemption. It's those two things that creatively make the shows different."


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Whedon and Greenwalt prepared a six-minute promotional video pitch, often called the "Unaired "Angel" pilot" for The WB. Some shots from this short were later used in the opening credits.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Early during the life of the series, some effort was made to slightly soften the original concept. For example, scenes were cut from the pilot episode, "City of," in which Angel tasted the blood of a murder victim; the episode that was originally written to be the second episode, "Corrupt", was abandoned altogether. Writer David Fury explained, "The network was shocked. They said 'We can't shoot this. This is way too dark.' We were able to break a new idea, we had to turn it over in three days." Instead, the tone was lightened and the opening episodes established Angel Investigations as an idealistic, shoestring operation.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: A first draft script reveals that "Angel" was originally intended to include the character Whistler, played by Max Perlich, who had already been featured in two "Buffy" episodes, "Becoming, Part One" and "Part Two". In an interview, Perlich said, "I never got called again. If they had called, I would have probably accepted because it was a great experience and I think Joss is very original and talented." Instead, the producers created a Whistler-like character, Doyle. Cordelia Chase, also from the original Sunnydale crew, joined Angel and Doyle.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Joss Whedon is credited as executive producer throughout the run of the series. Alongside "Angel", he was also working on a series of other projects such as "Buffy", "Fray", "Astonishing X-Men" and "Firefly", which would later also lead to the film "Serenity".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: For the first three seasons, David Greenwalt, who co-created the series with Whedon, was also credited as executive producer; during this time, he also took on the role of show runner. He left to oversee "Miracles", but continued to work on "Angel" as a consulting producer for the final two seasons. Tim Minear also served as an executive producer during the second season, contributing heavily to the season's story arc. At the start of the fourth season, David Simkins was made showrunner and executive producer, but after three months, he left the show due to "creative differences" and is not credited in any episodes. Established "Angel" writer Jeffrey Bell took over for the balance of season 4 and became executive producer for season 5. After "Buffy" concluded, writer David Fury joined the staff as executive producer for the final season.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband, Kaz Kuzui, were also credited as executive producers throughout "Angel", but were not involved in any writing or production for the show. Jeffrey Bell mentions in his DVD commentary during the closing credits of the "Angel" series finale "Not Fade Away" that two people were credited and paid for "Angel" without needing to ever step on the set. "Angel" crew member Dan Kerns also revealed in an essay that two executive producers "received credit and sizeable checks for the duration of "Buffy" and "Angel" for doing absolutely nothing". Their credit, rights and royalties for the whole "Buffy" franchise, which includes spinoff "Angel", relate to their funding, producing and directing of the original movie version of "Buffy".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Script-writing was done by Mutant Enemy, a production company created by Joss Whedon in 1997. The writers with the most writing credits for the series include: Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, Jeffrey Bell, David Fury, Steven S. DeKnight, Mere Smith, and Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain. Other authors with writing credits include: Shawn Ryan, Ben Edlund, Drew Goddard, Jeannine Renshaw, Howard Gordon, Jim Kouf, Jane Espenson, Doug Petrie, Tracey Stern, David H. Goodman, Scott Murphy, Marti Noxon and Brent Fletcher.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Jane Espenson has explained how scripts came together for Mutant Enemy Productions series "Buffy", "Angel" and "Firefly": a meeting was held and an idea was floated (generally by Whedon) and the writers brainstormed to develop the central theme of the episode and the character development. Next, the staff met in the anteroom to Whedon's office to begin "breaking" the story into acts and scenes; the only one absent would be the writer working on the previous week's episode.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Next, the writers developed the scenes onto a marker-filled whiteboard, featuring a "brief ordered description of each scene." A writer was then selected to create an outline of the episode's concept– occasionally with some dialogue and jokes– in one day. The outline was then given to the show runner, who revised it within a day. The writer used the revised outline to write the first draft of the script while the other writers worked on developing the next. This first draft was usually submitted for revision within 3–14 days; afterward, a second (and sometimes third) draft was written. After all revisions were made, the final draft would be produced as the "shooting draft".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The opening theme was composed by Holly Knight and Darling Violetta, an alternative rock group that performed two songs during the third season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Holly Knight was the music producer of the track. The next year, "Angel" invited bands to submit demos for the theme music to the show. They asked bands to use "dark superhero ideas" and "Cello-rock". Darling Violetta watched pivotal Angel-related episodes of "Buffy" such as "Passion", "Becoming, Parts One and Two" for inspiration. Eventually, Whedon accepted Darling Violetta's interpretation of an "Angel" theme as that most suitable to the show. The theme has a slower tempo than the "Buffy" theme, as well as heavier use of acoustic instruments such as cello. In 2005, the band composed an extended version of the "Angel" theme called "The Sanctuary Extended Remix", which featured on the soundtrack of the series "".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The demon karaoke bar, Caritas, is frequently used to spotlight pop hits. There has also been a soundtrack album, "Angel: Live Fast, Die Never". The soundtrack mostly consists of scores created for the show by Robert J. Kral along with a remixed theme and four other songs from the show. Douglas Romayne scored 33 episodes of "Angel" in seasons 4 and 5, along with series lead composer, Rob Kral.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: On February 14, 2004, the WB Network announced that "Angel" would not be brought back for a sixth season. The one-paragraph statement indicated that the news, which had been reported by an Internet site the previous day, had been leaked well before the network intended to make its announcement. Joss Whedon posted a message on a popular fan site, The Bronze: Beta, in which he expressed his dismay and surprise, saying he was "heartbroken" and described the situation as "Healthy Guy Falls Dead From Heart Attack." Fan reaction was to organize letter-writing campaigns, online petitions, blood and food drives, advertisements in trade magazines and via mobile billboards, and attempts to lobby other networks (UPN was a favorite target, as it had already picked up "Buffy"). Outrage for the cancellation focused on Jordan Levin, WB's Head of Entertainment. It was the second highest-rated program to be canceled on the WB.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Head writer David Fury "guaranteed" that if Joss Whedon had not requested an early renewal, "Angel" would have been back for a Season 6, saying Whedon's request for an early pick-up decision put Levin in a corner, forcing him to cancel the show, adding simply waiting would have gotten the show renewed. James Marsters made a similar statement, saying cancellation took the cast and production staff "completely by surprise".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: "Angel"'s final episode, "Not Fade Away", aired on the WB on May 19, 2004. The ambiguous final moments left some fans hoping for the continuation of "Angel" and the Buffyverse in the future - hopes that came to fruition in November 2007 with the publication of the first issue of the comic book series "". The series is Joss Whedon's official continuation of the "Angel" television series and follows in the footsteps of the comic book "Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight", whose first issue was published in March 2007.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: While "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was built around the angst of adolescence, "Angel" chronicles the different stages of adulthood after one leaves home and begins working. Cordelia Chase, who had been the most popular and superficial girl in Sunnydale High on "Buffy", develops over the course of the series from an insecure young woman struggling in a daunting real world into an unexpectedly mature woman. Similarly, Wesley, the once uptight and bookish Watcher, becomes a man of quiet confidence and often ruthless action.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: In much the same way as "Buffy" had been both a homage and parody of traditional horror films, "Angel" gave the same treatment to the classical film noir. Producer Kelly Manners said ""Angel" is a dark show about a man looking for redemption... We have an alcoholic metaphor with "Angel". Angel is a guy who is one drink away from going back to his evil roots" He attempts to find redemption through helping the helpless of Los Angeles in a fashion similar to that of noir detectives. The first episode even included a Philip Marlowe-style voiceover. Angel filled the role of the reluctant, streetwise detective who has dealings with a variety of underworld characters. In this case, the "underworld" is a literal underworld of demons and supernatural beings. In one instance, Angel is explicitly compared with fictional noir private-detective Marlowe. Many traditional "noir" stories and characters were explored in earlier episodes, including the ditzy but attractive secretary, the cagey but well-informed partner, and clashes with crooked lawyers, femme fatales and meddlesome, too-good-for-their-own-good cops. These were usually given a modern or supernatural twist.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: The style and focus of the show changed considerably over its run, and starting late in season two the original noir idea was mostly discarded in favor of more large-scale supernatural-themed conflicts. In later seasons, the mythology and stories became increasingly complex; in Season Four, one of the characters on the show itself described the storyline as "a turgid supernatural soap opera." Whereas the show initially dealt with the difficulty of being kind to people on a personal basis, the show ultimately focused on Angel's status as an archetypal Champion for humanity, and explored ideas such as moral ambiguity, the spiritual cost of violence, and the nature of free will. The enduring theme throughout the series was the struggle for redemption.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: "Angel" explored trust motifs as an increasingly central focus of the show. In the first two seasons, there were sprinklings of deceit and treachery, but in the last three seasons duplicity began to pervade the thematic structure, culminating in Season Five when almost every episode included some kind of double-cross, trickery, or illusion. An idea presented in Season Three was that even prophecy can betray, as they are often deceiving if not plain lies. In Season Five, it is repeatedly emphasized that the characters can trust no one in their new situation. The series is also notable for harsh betrayals within the cast of main characters; such events often having lethal consequences.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: "Angel" depicted the feelings of loneliness, danger, and callousness often attributed to the urban Los Angeles megalopolis. The divisions between the ordered world of the day and the chaotic world of the night have been trademark themes of "noir" and by depicting a protagonist who literally has no daytime life, the series was able to explore these same themes in more dramatic, metaphorical ways. As the series progressed, the creators were able to explore darker aspects of the characters, particularly Angel, who commits a number of morally questionable actions, and periodically reverts to his evil persona Angelus.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: An article in "The Independent" stated, "The LA-set spin-off to "Buffy" was initially dismissed as the original's poor cousin but gradually developed into a darkly entertaining show in its own right."


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: In two of the four seasons when both shows were in production, "Buffy"s overall yearly ratings were higher than "Angel"s.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: "Angel" gathered a number of awards. the International Horror Guild Award for Best Television in 2001. It received many awards and nominations from the Saturn Awards which are presented annually by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films: it won Best Network TV Series in 2004 and David Boreanaz won Best TV Actor in 2000, 2003, and 2004. Specific episodes, "Waiting in the Wings", "Smile Time", and "Not Fade Away", were nominated for Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form in 2003 and 2005.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: "Angel", itself a spinoff from "Buffy", has in turn inspired a whole "industry" of books, comics, and merchandise.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Outside of the TV series, "Angel" has been officially expanded and elaborated on by authors and artists in the so-called "Buffyverse Expanded Universe". The creators of these works may or may not keep to established continuity. Similarly, writers for the TV series were under no obligation to use information which had been established by the Expanded Universe and sometimes contradicted such continuity.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Many of these works are set at particular times within the Buffyverse. For example, Joss Whedon has written an "Angel" mini-series of comics, "Long Night's Journey", which was specifically set in early "Angel" Season Two. "Angel" comics were originally published by Dark Horse Comics, which published them from 2000 until 2002. IDW Publishing obtained rights to publish "Angel" comics in 2005 and has been releasing them since. Spinning off from the "Angel" comics comes an entire series of "Spike" comics, using the "Angel" logo's typeface in its depiction of the name "Spike", among these are the comics "Spike vs. Dracula", "" and "". As of November 2007 to February 2009, the story of the series was continued canonically in lieu of a Season Six in a 17-issue maxi-series titled "", written by Brian Lynch and plotted by both Lynch and Joss Whedon. This spun off into numerous "Angel" titles set after the television series, of which all are now considered canon, until 2011 when "Angel" rights revert to Dark Horse Comics who began to publish "Angel" comics under the banner of "Angel & Faith".


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: Following their success with a series of "Buffy" novels, Pocket Books purchased the license to produce novels for "Angel". Twenty-four "Angel" novels were published. Jeff Mariotte became the most successful "Angel" novelist, publishing eleven "Angel" novels. They also published seven "Buffy"/"Angel" crossover books that featured settings and characters from both series.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: In March 2006, Joss Whedon still talked of the possibility of a TV movie involving Spike to be written and directed by Tim Minear.


title: Angel (1999 TV series)

text: "Angel" has inspired magazines and companion books, as well as countless websites, online discussion forums, and works of fan fiction. Eden Studios have published an "Angel" role-playing game.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Amad Diallo (born 11 July 2002) is an Ivorian professional footballer who plays as a winger for club Sunderland, on loan from club Manchester United, and the Ivory Coast national team.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Born in the Ivory Coast, Diallo moved to Italy as a child. He joined the Atalanta youth system in 2015, where he won two Campionato Primavera 1 titles. In 2019, he scored on his debut for the senior team, making him the first player born in 2002 to score in Serie A. In January 2021, Diallo joined English club Manchester United; he was loaned out to Rangers and Sunderland in 2022.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Diallo made his senior international debut for the Ivory Coast at the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Diallo emigrated to Italy at a young age. He started out at Boca Barco's youth team in September 2014, where he impressed at a Christmas tournament the same year; he was the tournament's top goalscorer as the youngest on the field. Diallo was officially registered to the team on 14 January 2015.


title: Amad Diallo

text: With a number of Serie A clubs being interested in him while at Boca Barco, Diallo moved to Atalanta in 2015. While initially starting out with the under-14s during the 2015–16 season, Diallo quickly moved to the under-15 team. He played in the Final Eight, scoring against Roma in the final and helping his side win the league title.


title: Amad Diallo

text: During the 2016–17 season he played for the under-15 side, before moving to the under-17s in 2017–18 where he scored 12 goals in 27 appearances. In 2018–19, Diallo scored 12 goals and made seven assists in 16 under-17 games, and six goals and six assists in 26 games in the Campionato Primavera 1, the under-19 championship. He won the 2018–19 season with Atalanta.


title: Amad Diallo

text: In 2019, Diallo won the Supercoppa Primavera, providing both assists in a 2–1 win over Fiorentina. He scored six goals and made six assists in 25 league games, helping Atalanta win the Campionato Primavera 1 in 2019–20 for a second successive season.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Coming through the youth system, Diallo made his Serie A debut on 27 October 2019, coming on from the bench on the 79th minute against Udinese; he scored his first goal for Atalanta four minutes later in a 7–1 home win. Diallo became the first player born in 2002 to score in the Italian top flight. His first UEFA Champions League call-up came on 11 December 2019, as an unused substitute in a 3–0 away win against Shakhtar Donetsk.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Diallo's first league game in 2020–21 was on 28 November 2020, as a 77th-minute substitute against Hellas Verona; Atalanta lost 2–0 at home. Diallo made his Champions League debut on 1 December, after being subbed on in the 68th minute against Midtjylland in a 1–1 home draw.


title: Amad Diallo

text: On 5 October 2020, Manchester United agreed to sign Diallo in January 2021, pending the agreement of personal terms, passing a medical and the issue of a work permit. The reported fee was of €25 million – €40 million including bonuses. Diallo officially joined on 7 January 2021, on a five-year contract with the option of an extra year.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Diallo scored a brace on his debut for the Under-23s, in a 6–3 win over Liverpool on 30 January. He was first called up to the senior team on 9 February, as an unused substitute in an FA Cup fifth round match against West Ham United, which ended in a 1–0 Manchester United win after extra time. On 18 February, Diallo made his first-team debut for United as a substitute for Mason Greenwood in a 4–0 away win over Real Sociedad in the first leg of the Europa League round of 32 tie. His first goal for United came on 11 March, in a 1–1 home draw against AC Milan in the first leg of the Europa League round of 16 tie.


title: Amad Diallo

text: On 13 March, Diallo was selected by the IFFHS in their 2020 CAF Youth Team of the Year (U20). He made his FA Cup debut on 21 March, coming on as an 84th-minute substitute in a 3–1 away defeat against Leicester City in the quarter-finals. On 11 May, Diallo made his Premier League debut against Leicester City, assisting Mason Greenwood's goal in a 2–1 defeat; the goal was the first time in 15 years a teenager assisted another for a Premier League goal.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Diallo played his first game of the 2021–22 season on 8 December 2021, starting the UEFA Champions League group stage match against Young Boys.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Diallo was loaned to Scottish Premiership club Rangers on 27 January 2022 for the remainder of the 2021–22 season. He made his debut on 29 January, scoring the opener of the game as a starter in a 3–3 away draw to Ross County.


title: Amad Diallo

text: On 31 August 2022, Diallo joined Sunderland in the Championship on a season-long loan. He scored his first goal for Sunderland on 22 October, in a 4–2 home defeat to Burnley.


title: Amad Diallo

text: Diallo was first called up to the Ivory Coast national team on 18 March 2021, for their 2021 Africa Cup of Nations qualification matches against Niger and Ethiopia on 26 and 30 March, respectively. He made his debut against Niger, coming on as an 86th-minute substitute. On 5 June 2021, Diallo scored his first international goal in a friendly against Burkina Faso, through a 97th-minute free kick, to help his team win 2–1 at home.


title: Amad Diallo

text: On 3 July 2021, Diallo was named in the Ivory Coast Olympic team for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Diallo made his Olympics debut with an assist in a 2–1 win against Saudi Arabia on 22 July.


title: Amad Diallo

text: A winger who is also capable of playing as a "mezzala", Diallo is a quick and dynamic player with a high technical ability and a good vision of the game. The fact that he is two-footed makes him a versatile player.


title: Amad Diallo

text: In July 2020, an investigation into trafficking of football players was launched by the public prosecutor's office of Parma. Among the involved was Hamed Mamadou Traorè, a distant relative of Amad and his alleged brother Hamed Traorè, who was accused of posing as their father to facilitate their immigration into Italy. The investigation also questioned the relationship between Amad and Hamed.


title: Amad Diallo

text: On 11 July 2020, the day of his 18th birthday, the player changed his Instagram name from "Amad Traoré" to "Amad Diallo", with a caption reading "don't call me Traoré anymore". In September 2020, his name was legally changed to Amad Diallo.


title: Amad Diallo

text: On 9 February 2021, Diallo was found guilty of violating the Italian Sports Justice Code in order to join the football club "ASD Boca Barco" in 2015 under the name "Diallo Amad Traorè". He was accused of falsifying documents in order to fake a relationship with Hamed Mamadou Traorè, an Ivorian citizen resident in Italy, and request a family reunification. Diallo requested a plea bargain, with the Federal Prosecutor's Office imposing a fine of €48,000.


title: Depth-first search

text: Depth-first search (DFS) is an algorithm for traversing or searching tree or graph data structures. The algorithm starts at the root node (selecting some arbitrary node as the root node in the case of a graph) and explores as far as possible along each branch before backtracking. Extra memory, usually a stack, is needed to keep track of the nodes discovered so far along a specified branch which helps in backtracking of the graph.


title: Depth-first search

text: A version of depth-first search was investigated in the 19th century by French mathematician Charles Pierre Trémaux as a strategy for solving mazes.


title: Depth-first search

text: The time and space analysis of DFS differs according to its application area. In theoretical computer science, DFS is typically used to traverse an entire graph, and takes time where formula_1 is the number of vertices and formula_2 the number of edges. This is linear in the size of the graph. In these applications it also uses space formula_3 in the worst case to store the stack of vertices on the current search path as well as the set of already-visited vertices. Thus, in this setting, the time and space bounds are the same as for breadth-first search and the choice of which of these two algorithms to use depends less on their complexity and more on the different properties of the vertex orderings the two algorithms produce.


title: Depth-first search

text: For applications of DFS in relation to specific domains, such as searching for solutions in artificial intelligence or web-crawling, the graph to be traversed is often either too large to visit in its entirety or infinite (DFS may suffer from non-termination). In such cases, search is only performed to a limited depth; due to limited resources, such as memory or disk space, one typically does not use data structures to keep track of the set of all previously visited vertices. When search is performed to a limited depth, the time is still linear in terms of the number of expanded vertices and edges (although this number is not the same as the size of the entire graph because some vertices may be searched more than once and others not at all) but the space complexity of this variant of DFS is only proportional to the depth limit, and as a result, is much smaller than the space needed for searching to the same depth using breadth-first search. For such applications, DFS also lends itself much better to heuristic methods for choosing a likely-looking branch. When an appropriate depth limit is not known a priori, iterative deepening depth-first search applies DFS repeatedly with a sequence of increasing limits. In the artificial intelligence mode of analysis, with a branching factor greater than one, iterative deepening increases the running time by only a constant factor over the case in which the correct depth limit is known due to the geometric growth of the number of nodes per level.


title: Depth-first search

text: DFS may also be used to collect a sample of graph nodes. However, incomplete DFS, similarly to incomplete BFS, is biased towards nodes of high degree.


title: Depth-first search

text: a depth-first search starting at the node A, assuming that the left edges in the shown graph are chosen before right edges, and assuming the search remembers previously visited nodes and will not repeat them (since this is a small graph), will visit the nodes in the following order: A, B, D, F, E, C, G. The edges traversed in this search form a Trémaux tree, a structure with important applications in graph theory.


title: Depth-first search

text: Performing the same search without remembering previously visited nodes results in visiting the nodes in the order A, B, D, F, E, A, B, D, F, E, etc. forever, caught in the A, B, D, F, E cycle and never reaching C or G.


title: Depth-first search

text: The result of a depth-first search of a graph can be conveniently described in terms of a spanning tree of the vertices reached during the search. Based on this spanning tree, the edges of the original graph can be divided into three classes: forward edges, which point from a node of the tree to one of its descendants, back edges, which point from a node to one of its ancestors, and cross edges, which do neither. Sometimes tree edges, edges which belong to the spanning tree itself, are classified separately from forward edges. If the original graph is undirected then all of its edges are tree edges or back edges.


title: Depth-first search

text: It is also possible to use depth-first search to linearly order the vertices of a graph or tree. There are four possible ways of doing this:


title: Depth-first search

text: For example, when searching the directed graph below beginning at node A, the sequence of traversals is either A B D B A C A or A C D C A B A (choosing to first visit B or C from A is up to the algorithm). Note that repeat visits in the form of backtracking to a node, to check if it has still unvisited neighbors, are included here (even if it is found to have none). Thus the possible preorderings are A B D C and A C D B, while the possible postorderings are D B C A and D C B A, and the possible reverse postorderings are A C B D and A B C D.


title: Depth-first search

text: Reverse postordering produces a topological sorting of any directed acyclic graph. This ordering is also useful in control-flow analysis as it often represents a natural linearization of the control flows. The graph above might represent the flow of control in the code fragment below, and it is natural to consider this code in the order A B C D or A C B D but not natural to use the order A B D C or A C D B.


title: Depth-first search

text: A non-recursive implementation of DFS with worst-case space complexity formula_4, with the possibility of duplicate vertices on the stack:


title: Depth-first search

text: These two variations of DFS visit the neighbors of each vertex in the opposite order from each other: the first neighbor of "v" visited by the recursive variation is the first one in the list of adjacent edges, while in the iterative variation the first visited neighbor is the last one in the list of adjacent edges. The recursive implementation will visit the nodes from the example graph in the following order: A, B, D, F, E, C, G. The non-recursive implementation will visit the nodes as: A, E, F, B, D, C, G.


title: Depth-first search

text: If is a tree, replacing the queue of the breadth-first search algorithm with a stack will yield a depth-first search algorithm. For general graphs, replacing the stack of the iterative depth-first search implementation with a queue would also produce a breadth-first search algorithm, although a somewhat nonstandard one.


title: Depth-first search

text: Another possible implementation of iterative depth-first search uses a stack of iterators of the list of neighbors of a node, instead of a stack of nodes. This yields the same traversal as recursive DFS.


title: Depth-first search

text: The computational complexity of DFS was investigated by John Reif. More precisely, given a graph formula_5, let formula_6 be the ordering computed by the standard recursive DFS algorithm. This ordering is called the lexicographic depth-first search ordering. John Reif considered the complexity of computing the lexicographic depth-first search ordering, given a graph and a source. A decision version of the problem (testing whether some vertex occurs before some vertex in this order) is P-complete, meaning that it is "a nightmare for parallel processing".


title: Depth-first search

text: A depth-first search ordering (not necessarily the lexicographic one), can be computed by a randomized parallel algorithm in the complexity class RNC. As of 1997, it remained unknown whether a depth-first traversal could be constructed by a deterministic parallel algorithm, in the complexity class NC.


title: Perception

text: Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.


title: Perception

text: Perception is not only the passive receipt of these signals, but it is also shaped by the recipient's learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Sensory input is a process that transforms this low-level information to higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition). The process that follows connects a person's concepts and expectations (or knowledge), restorative and selective mechanisms (such as attention) that influence perception.


title: Perception

text: Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness. Since the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th century, psychology's understanding of perception has progressed by combining a variety of techniques. Psychophysics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical qualities of the sensory input and perception. Sensory neuroscience studies the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally, in terms of the information they process. Perceptual issues in philosophy include the extent to which sensory qualities such as sound, smell or color exist in objective reality rather than in the mind of the perceiver.


title: Perception

text: Although people traditionally viewed the senses as passive receptors, the study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain's perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input. There is still active debate about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous to science, or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process unnecessary.


title: Perception

text: The perceptual systems of the brain enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying. Human and other animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps, mapping some aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface. These different modules are interconnected and influence each other. For instance, taste is strongly influenced by smell.


title: Perception

text: The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, known as the "distal stimulus" or "distal object". By means of light, sound, or another physical process, the object stimulates the body's sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called "transduction". This raw pattern of neural activity is called the "proximal stimulus". These neural signals are then transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the "percept".


title: Perception

text: To explain the process of perception, an example could be an ordinary shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person's eye and stimulates the retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus. The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept. Another example could be a ringing telephone. The ringing of the phone is the distal stimulus. The sound stimulating a person's auditory receptors is the proximal stimulus. The brain's interpretation of this as the "ringing of a telephone" is the percept.


title: Perception

text: The different kinds of sensation (such as warmth, sound, and taste) are called "sensory modalities" or "stimulus modalities".


title: Perception

text: Psychologist Jerome Bruner developed a model of perception, in which people put "together the information contained in" a target and a situation to form "perceptions of ourselves and others based on social categories." This model is composed of three states:


title: Perception

text: Stimuli are not necessarily translated into a percept and rarely does a single stimulus translate into a percept. An ambiguous stimulus may sometimes be transduced into one or more percepts, experienced randomly, one at a time, in a process termed "multistable perception". The same stimuli, or absence of them, may result in different percepts depending on subject's culture and previous experiences.


title: Perception

text: Ambiguous figures demonstrate that a single stimulus can result in more than one percept. For example, the Rubin vase can be interpreted either as a vase or as two faces. The percept can bind sensations from multiple senses into a whole. A picture of a talking person on a television screen, for example, is bound to the sound of speech from speakers to form a percept of a talking person.


title: Perception

text: In many ways, vision is the primary human sense. Light is taken in through each eye and focused in a way which sorts it on the retina according to direction of origin. A dense surface of photosensitive cells, including rods, cones, and intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells captures information about the intensity, color, and position of incoming light. Some processing of texture and movement occurs within the neurons on the retina before the information is sent to the brain. In total, about 15 differing types of information are then forwarded to the brain proper via the optic nerve.


title: Perception

text: The timing of perception of a visual event, at points along the visual circuit, have been measured. A sudden alteration of light at a spot in the environment first alters photoreceptor cells in the retina, which send a signal to the retina bipolar cell layer which, in turn, can activate a retinal ganglion neuron cell. A retinal ganglion cell is a bridging neuron that connects visual retinal input to the visual processing centers within the central nervous system. Light-altered neuron activation occurs within about 5–20 milliseconds in a rabbit retinal ganglion, although in a mouse retinal ganglion cell the initial spike takes between 40 and 240 milliseconds before the initial activation. The initial activation can be detected by an action potential spike, a sudden spike in neuron membrane electric voltage.


title: Perception

text: A perceptual visual event measured in humans was the presentation to individuals of an anomalous word. If these individuals are shown a sentence, presented as a sequence of single words on a computer screen, with a puzzling word out of place in the sequence, the perception of the puzzling word can register on an electroencephalogram (EEG). In an experiment, human readers wore an elastic cap with 64 embedded electrodes distributed over their scalp surface. Within 230 milliseconds of encountering the anomalous word, the human readers generated an event-related electrical potential alteration of their EEG at the left occipital-temporal channel, over the left occipital lobe and temporal lobe.


title: Perception

text: Hearing (or "audition") is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations (i.e., "sonic" detection). Frequencies capable of being heard by humans are called "audio" or "audible" "frequencies", the range of which is typically considered to be between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. Frequencies higher than audio are referred to as "ultrasonic", while frequencies below audio are referred to as "infrasonic".


title: Perception

text: The auditory system includes the outer ears, which collect and filter sound waves; the middle ear, which transforms the sound pressure (impedance matching); and the inner ear, which produces neural signals in response to the sound. By the ascending auditory pathway these are led to the primary auditory cortex within the temporal lobe of the human brain, from where the auditory information then goes to the cerebral cortex for further processing.


title: Perception

text: Sound does not usually come from a single source: in real situations, sounds from multiple sources and directions are as they arrive at the ears. Hearing involves the computationally complex task of separating out sources of interest, identifying them and often estimating their distance and direction.


title: Perception

text: The process of recognizing objects through touch is known as "haptic perception". It involves a combination of somatosensory perception of patterns on the skin surface (e.g., edges, curvature, and texture) and proprioception of hand position and conformation. People can rapidly and accurately identify three-dimensional objects by touch. This involves exploratory procedures, such as moving the fingers over the outer surface of the object or holding the entire object in the hand. Haptic perception relies on the forces experienced during touch.


title: Perception

text: Gibson defined the haptic system as "the sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body." Gibson and others emphasized the close link between body movement and haptic perception, where the latter is "active exploration."


title: Perception

text: The concept of haptic perception is related to the concept of extended physiological proprioception according to which, when using a tool such as a stick, perceptual experience is transparently transferred to the end of the tool.


title: Perception

text: Taste (formally known as "gustation") is the ability to perceive the flavor of substances, including, but not limited to, food. Humans receive tastes through sensory organs concentrated on the upper surface of the tongue, called "taste buds" or "gustatory calyculi". The human tongue has 100 to 150 taste receptor cells on each of its roughly-ten thousand taste buds.


title: Perception

text: Traditionally, there have been four primary tastes: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, and saltiness. The recognition and awareness of umami, which is considered the fifth primary taste, is a relatively recent development in Western cuisine. Other tastes can be mimicked by combining these basic tastes, all of which contribute only partially to the sensation and flavor of food in the mouth. Other factors include smell, which is detected by the olfactory epithelium of the nose; texture, which is detected through a variety of mechanoreceptors, muscle nerves, etc.; and temperature, which is detected by thermoreceptors. All basic tastes are classified as either "appetitive" or "aversive", depending upon whether the things they sense are harmful or beneficial.


title: Perception

text: Smell is the process of absorbing molecules through olfactory organs, which are absorbed by humans through the nose. These molecules diffuse through a thick layer of mucus; come into contact with one of thousands of cilia that are projected from sensory neurons; and are then absorbed into a receptor (one of 347 or so). It is this process that causes humans to understand the concept of smell from a physical standpoint.


title: Perception

text: Smell is also a very interactive sense as scientists have begun to observe that olfaction comes into contact with the other sense in unexpected ways. It is also the most primal of the senses, as it is known to be the first indicator of safety or danger, therefore being the sense that drives the most basic of human survival skills. As such, it can be a catalyst for human behavior on a subconscious and instinctive level.


title: Perception

text: Social perception is the part of perception that allows people to understand the individuals and groups of their social world. Thus, it is an element of social cognition.


title: Perception

text: "Speech perception" is the process by which spoken language is heard, interpreted and understood. Research in this field seeks to understand how human listeners recognize the sound of speech (or "phonetics") and use such information to understand spoken language.


title: Perception

text: Listeners manage to perceive words across a wide range of conditions, as the sound of a word can vary widely according to words that surround it and the tempo of the speech, as well as the physical characteristics, accent, tone, and mood of the speaker. Reverberation, signifying the persistence of sound after the sound is produced, can also have a considerable impact on perception. Experiments have shown that people automatically compensate for this effect when hearing speech.


title: Perception

text: The process of perceiving speech begins at the level of the sound within the auditory signal and the process of audition. The initial auditory signal is compared with visual information—primarily lip movement—to extract acoustic cues and phonetic information. It is possible other sensory modalities are integrated at this stage as well. This speech information can then be used for higher-level language processes, such as word recognition.


title: Perception

text: Speech perception is not necessarily uni-directional. Higher-level language processes connected with morphology, syntax, and/or semantics may also interact with basic speech perception processes to aid in recognition of speech sounds. It may be the case that it is not necessary (maybe not even possible) for a listener to recognize phonemes before recognizing higher units, such as words. In an experiment, Richard M. Warren replaced one phoneme of a word with a cough-like sound. His subjects restored the missing speech sound perceptually without any difficulty. Moreover, they were not able to accurately identify which phoneme had even been disturbed.


title: Perception

text: "Facial perception" refers to cognitive processes specialized in handling human faces (including perceiving the identity of an individual) and facial expressions (such as emotional cues.)


title: Perception

text: The "somatosensory cortex" is a part of the brain that receives and encodes sensory information from receptors of the entire body.


title: Perception

text: Affective touch is a type of sensory information that elicits an emotional reaction and is usually social in nature. Such information is actually coded differently than other sensory information. Though the intensity of affective touch is still encoded in the primary somatosensory cortex, the feeling of pleasantness associated with affective touch is activated more in the anterior cingulate cortex. Increased blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast imaging, identified during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), shows that signals in the anterior cingulate cortex, as well as the prefrontal cortex, are highly correlated with pleasantness scores of affective touch. Inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex inhibits the perception of affective touch intensity, but not affective touch pleasantness. Therefore, the S1 is not directly involved in processing socially affective touch pleasantness, but still plays a role in discriminating touch location and intensity.


title: Perception

text: Multi-modal perception refers to concurrent stimulation in more than one sensory modality and the effect such has on the perception of events and objects in the world.


title: Perception

text: Chronoception refers to how the passage of time is perceived and experienced. Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system, the work of psychologists and neuroscientists indicates that human brains do have a system governing the perception of time, composed of a highly distributed system involving the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. One particular component of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, is responsible for the circadian rhythm (commonly known as one's "internal clock"), while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range timekeeping, known as an "ultradian rhythm".


title: Perception

text: One or more dopaminergic pathways in the central nervous system appear to have a strong modulatory influence on mental chronometry, particularly interval timing.


title: Perception

text: "Sense of agency" refers to the subjective feeling of having chosen a particular action. Some conditions, such as schizophrenia, can cause a loss of this sense, which may lead a person into delusions, such as feeling like a machine or like an outside source is controlling them. An opposite extreme can also occur, where people experience everything in their environment as though they had decided that it would happen.


title: Perception

text: Even in non-pathological cases, there is a measurable difference between the making of a decision and the feeling of agency. Through methods such as the Libet experiment, a gap of half a second or more can be detected from the time when there are detectable neurological signs of a decision having been made to the time when the subject actually becomes conscious of the decision.


title: Perception

text: There are also experiments in which an illusion of agency is induced in psychologically normal subjects. In 1999, psychologists Wegner and Wheatley gave subjects instructions to move a mouse around a scene and point to an image about once every thirty seconds. However, a second person—acting as a test subject but actually a confederate—had their hand on the mouse at the same time, and controlled some of the movement. Experimenters were able to arrange for subjects to perceive certain "forced stops" as if they were their own choice.


title: Perception

text: Recognition memory is sometimes divided into two functions by neuroscientists: "familiarity" and "recollection". A strong sense of familiarity can occur without any recollection, for example in cases of deja vu.


title: Perception

text: The temporal lobe (specifically the perirhinal cortex) responds differently to stimuli that feel novel compared to stimuli that feel familiar. Firing rates in the perirhinal cortex are connected with the sense of familiarity in humans and other mammals. In tests, stimulating this area at 10–15 Hz caused animals to treat even novel images as familiar, and stimulation at 30–40 Hz caused novel images to be partially treated as familiar. In particular, stimulation at 30–40 Hz led to animals looking at a familiar image for longer periods, as they would for an unfamiliar one, though it did not lead to the same exploration behavior normally associated with novelty.


title: Perception

text: Recent studies on lesions in the area concluded that rats with a damaged perirhinal cortex were still more interested in exploring when novel objects were present, but seemed unable to tell novel objects from familiar ones—they examined both equally. Thus, other brain regions are involved with noticing unfamiliarity, while the perirhinal cortex is needed to associate the feeling with a specific source.


title: Perception

text: Sexual stimulation is any stimulus (including bodily contact) that leads to, enhances, and maintains sexual arousal, possibly even leading to orgasm. Distinct from the general sense of touch, sexual stimulation is strongly tied to hormonal activity and chemical triggers in the body. Although sexual arousal may arise without physical stimulation, achieving orgasm usually requires physical sexual stimulation (stimulation of the Krause-Finger corpuscles found in erogenous zones of the body.)


title: Perception

text: Other senses enable perception of body balance, acceleration, gravity, position of body parts, temperature, and pain. They can also enable perception of internal senses, such as suffocation, gag reflex, abdominal distension, fullness of rectum and urinary bladder, and sensations felt in the throat and lungs.


title: Perception

text: In the case of visual perception, some people can see the percept shift in their mind's eye. Others, who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. This esemplastic nature has been demonstrated by an experiment that showed that ambiguous images have multiple interpretations on the perceptual level.


title: Perception

text: The confusing ambiguity of perception is exploited in human technologies such as camouflage and biological mimicry. For example, the wings of European peacock butterflies bear eyespots that birds respond to as though they were the eyes of a dangerous predator.


title: Perception

text: There is also evidence that the brain in some ways operates on a slight "delay" in order to allow nerve impulses from distant parts of the body to be integrated into simultaneous signals.


title: Perception

text: Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology. The oldest quantitative laws in psychology are Weber's law, which states that the smallest noticeable difference in stimulus intensity is proportional to the intensity of the reference; and Fechner's law, which quantifies the relationship between the intensity of the physical stimulus and its perceptual counterpart (e.g., testing how much darker a computer screen can get before the viewer actually notices). The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt School of Psychology, with an emphasis on holistic approach.


title: Perception

text: A "sensory system" is a part of the nervous system responsible for processing sensory information. A sensory system consists of sensory receptors, neural pathways, and parts of the brain involved in sensory perception. Commonly recognized sensory systems are those for vision, hearing, somatic sensation (touch), taste and olfaction (smell), as listed above. It has been suggested that the immune system is an overlooked sensory modality. In short, senses are transducers from the physical world to the realm of the mind.


title: Perception

text: The receptive field is the specific part of the world to which a receptor organ and receptor cells respond. For instance, the part of the world an eye can see, is its receptive field; the light that each rod or cone can see, is its receptive field. Receptive fields have been identified for the visual system, auditory system and somatosensory system, so far. Research attention is currently focused not only on external perception processes, but also to "interoception", considered as the process of receiving, accessing and appraising internal bodily signals. Maintaining desired physiological states is critical for an organism's well-being and survival. Interoception is an iterative process, requiring the interplay between perception of body states and awareness of these states to generate proper self-regulation. Afferent sensory signals continuously interact with higher order cognitive representations of goals, history, and environment, shaping emotional experience and motivating regulatory behavior.


title: Perception

text: "Perceptual constancy" is the ability of perceptual systems to recognize the same object from widely varying sensory inputs. For example, individual people can be recognized from views, such as frontal and profile, which form very different shapes on the retina. A coin looked at face-on makes a circular image on the retina, but when held at angle it makes an elliptical image. In normal perception these are recognized as a single three-dimensional object. Without this correction process, an animal approaching from the distance would appear to gain in size. One kind of perceptual constancy is "color constancy": for example, a white piece of paper can be recognized as such under different colors and intensities of light. Another example is "roughness constancy": when a hand is drawn quickly across a surface, the touch nerves are stimulated more intensely. The brain compensates for this, so the speed of contact does not affect the perceived roughness. Other constancies include melody, odor, brightness and words. These constancies are not always total, but the variation in the percept is much less than the variation in the physical stimulus. The perceptual systems of the brain achieve perceptual constancy in a variety of ways, each specialized for the kind of information being processed, with phonemic restoration as a notable example from hearing.


title: Perception

text: The "principles of grouping" (or "Gestalt laws of grouping") are a set of principles in psychology, first proposed by Gestalt psychologists, to explain how humans naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and objects. Gestalt psychologists argued that these principles exist because the mind has an innate disposition to perceive patterns in the stimulus based on certain rules. These principles are organized into six categories:


title: Perception

text: A common finding across many different kinds of perception is that the perceived qualities of an object can be affected by the qualities of context. If one object is extreme on some dimension, then neighboring objects are perceived as further away from that extreme.


title: Perception

text: "Simultaneous contrast effect" is the term used when stimuli are presented at the same time, whereas "successive contrast" applies when stimuli are presented one after another.


title: Perception

text: The contrast effect was noted by the 17th Century philosopher John Locke, who observed that lukewarm water can feel hot or cold depending on whether the hand touching it was previously in hot or cold water. In the early 20th Century, Wilhelm Wundt identified contrast as a fundamental principle of perception, and since then the effect has been confirmed in many different areas. These effects shape not only visual qualities like color and brightness, but other kinds of perception, including how heavy an object feels. One experiment found that thinking of the name "Hitler" led to subjects rating a person as more hostile. Whether a piece of music is perceived as good or bad can depend on whether the music heard before it was pleasant or unpleasant. For the effect to work, the objects being compared need to be similar to each other: a television reporter can seem smaller when interviewing a tall basketball player, but not when standing next to a tall building. In the brain, brightness contrast exerts effects on both neuronal firing rates and neuronal synchrony.


title: Perception

text: Cognitive theories of perception assume there is a poverty of stimulus. This is the claim that sensations, by themselves, are unable to provide a unique description of the world. Sensations require 'enriching', which is the role of the mental model.


title: Perception

text: The perceptual ecology approach was introduced by James J. Gibson, who rejected the assumption of a poverty of stimulus and the idea that perception is based upon sensations. Instead, Gibson investigated what information is actually presented to the perceptual systems. His theory "assumes the existence of stable, unbounded, and permanent stimulus-information in the ambient optic array. And it supposes that the visual system can explore and detect this information. The theory is information-based, not sensation-based." He and the psychologists who work within this paradigm detailed how the world could be specified to a mobile, exploring organism via the lawful projection of information about the world into energy arrays. "Specification" would be a 1:1 mapping of some aspect of the world into a perceptual array. Given such a mapping, no enrichment is required and perception is direct.


title: Perception

text: From Gibson's early work derived an ecological understanding of perception known as "perception-in-action," which argues that perception is a requisite property of animate action. It posits that, without perception, action would be unguided, and without action, perception would serve no purpose. Animate actions require both perception and motion, which can be described as "two sides of the same coin, the coin is action." Gibson works from the assumption that singular entities, which he calls "invariants," already exist in the real world and that all that the perception process does is home in upon them.


title: Perception

text: The constructivist view, held by such philosophers as Ernst von Glasersfeld, regards the continual adjustment of perception and action to the external input as precisely what constitutes the "entity," which is therefore far from being invariant. Glasersfeld considers an "invariant" as a target to be homed in upon, and a pragmatic necessity to allow an initial measure of understanding to be established prior to the updating that a statement aims to achieve. The invariant does not, and need not, represent an actuality. Glasersfeld describes it as extremely unlikely that what is desired or feared by an organism will never suffer change as time goes on. This social constructionist theory thus allows for a needful evolutionary adjustment.


title: Perception

text: A mathematical theory of perception-in-action has been devised and investigated in many forms of controlled movement, and has been described in many different species of organism using the General Tau Theory. According to this theory, "tau information", or time-to-goal information is the fundamental "percept" in perception.


title: Perception

text: Many philosophers, such as Jerry Fodor, write that the purpose of perception is knowledge. However, evolutionary psychologists hold that the primary purpose of perception is to guide action. They give the example of depth perception, which seems to have evolved not to aid in knowing the distances to other objects but rather to aid movement. Evolutionary psychologists argue that animals ranging from fiddler crabs to humans use eyesight for collision avoidance, suggesting that vision is basically for directing action, not providing knowledge. Neuropsychologists showed that perception systems evolved along the specifics of animals' activities. This explains why bats and worms can perceive different frequency of auditory and visual systems than, for example, humans.


title: Perception

text: Building and maintaining sense organs is metabolically expensive. More than half the brain is devoted to processing sensory information, and the brain itself consumes roughly one-fourth of one's metabolic resources. Thus, such organs evolve only when they provide exceptional benefits to an organism's fitness.


title: Perception

text: Scientists who study perception and sensation have long understood the human senses as adaptations. Depth perception consists of processing over half a dozen visual cues, each of which is based on a regularity of the physical world. Vision evolved to respond to the narrow range of electromagnetic energy that is plentiful and that does not pass through objects. Sound waves provide useful information about the sources of and distances to objects, with larger animals making and hearing lower-frequency sounds and smaller animals making and hearing higher-frequency sounds. Taste and smell respond to chemicals in the environment that were significant for fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The sense of touch is actually many senses, including pressure, heat, cold, tickle, and pain. Pain, while unpleasant, is adaptive. An important adaptation for senses is range shifting, by which the organism becomes temporarily more or less sensitive to sensation. For example, one's eyes automatically adjust to dim or bright ambient light. Sensory abilities of different organisms often co-evolve, as is the case with the hearing of echolocating bats and that of the moths that have evolved to respond to the sounds that the bats make.


title: Perception

text: Evolutionary psychologists claim that perception demonstrates the principle of modularity, with specialized mechanisms handling particular perception tasks. For example, people with damage to a particular part of the brain are not able to recognize faces ("prosopagnosia"). Evolutionary psychology suggests that this indicates a so-called face-reading module.


title: Perception

text: The theory of closed-loop perception proposes dynamic motor-sensory closed-loop process in which information flows through the environment and the brain in continuous loops.


title: Perception

text: Anne Treisman's feature integration theory (FIT) attempts to explain how characteristics of a stimulus such as physical location in space, motion, color, and shape are merged to form one percept despite each of these characteristics activating separate areas of the cortex. FIT explains this through a two part system of perception involving the preattentive and focused attention stages.


title: Perception

text: The preattentive stage of perception is largely unconscious, and analyzes an object by breaking it down into its basic features, such as the specific color, geometric shape, motion, depth, individual lines, and many others. Studies have shown that, when small groups of objects with different features (e.g., red triangle, blue circle) are briefly flashed in front of human participants, many individuals later report seeing shapes made up of the combined features of two different stimuli, thereby referred to as illusory conjunctions.


title: Perception

text: The unconnected features described in the preattentive stage are combined into the objects one normally sees during the focused attention stage. The focused attention stage is based heavily around the idea of attention in perception and 'binds' the features together onto specific objects at specific spatial locations (see the binding problem).


title: Perception

text: With experience, organisms can learn to make finer perceptual distinctions, and learn new kinds of categorization. Wine-tasting, the reading of X-ray images and music appreciation are applications of this process in the human sphere. Research has focused on the relation of this to other kinds of learning, and whether it takes place in peripheral sensory systems or in the brain's processing of sense information. Empirical research show that specific practices (such as yoga, mindfulness, Tai Chi, meditation, Daoshi and other mind-body disciplines) can modify human perceptual modality. Specifically, these practices enable perception skills to switch from the external (exteroceptive field) towards a higher ability to focus on internal signals ("proprioception"). Also, when asked to provide verticality judgments, highly self-transcendent yoga practitioners were significantly less influenced by a misleading visual context. Increasing self-transcendence may enable yoga practitioners to optimize verticality judgment tasks by relying more on internal (vestibular and proprioceptive) signals coming from their own body, rather than on exteroceptive, visual cues.


title: Perception

text: Past actions and events that transpire right before an encounter or any form of stimulation have a strong degree of influence on how sensory stimuli are processed and perceived. On a basic level, the information our senses receive is often ambiguous and incomplete. However, they are grouped together in order for us to be able to understand the physical world around us. But it is these various forms of stimulation, combined with our previous knowledge and experience that allows us to create our overall perception. For example, when engaging in conversation, we attempt to understand their message and words by not only paying attention to what we hear through our ears but also from the previous shapes we have seen our mouths make. Another example would be if we had a similar topic come up in another conversation, we would use our previous knowledge to guess the direction the conversation is headed in.


title: Perception

text: A "perceptual set" (also called "perceptual expectancy" or simply "set") is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way. It is an example of how perception can be shaped by "top-down" processes such as drives and expectations. Perceptual sets occur in all the different senses. They can be long term, such as a special sensitivity to hearing one's own name in a crowded room, or short-term, as in the ease with which hungry people notice the smell of food. A simple demonstration of the effect involved very brief presentations of non-words such as "sael". Subjects who were told to expect words about animals read it as "seal", but others who were expecting boat-related words read it as "sail".


title: Perception

text: Sets can be created by motivation and so can result in people interpreting ambiguous figures so that they see what they want to see. For instance, how someone perceives what unfolds during a sports game can be biased if they strongly support one of the teams. In one experiment, students were allocated to pleasant or unpleasant tasks by a computer. They were told that either a number or a letter would flash on the screen to say whether they were going to taste an orange juice drink or an unpleasant-tasting health drink. In fact, an ambiguous figure was flashed on screen, which could either be read as the letter B or the number 13. When the letters were associated with the pleasant task, subjects were more likely to perceive a letter B, and when letters were associated with the unpleasant task they tended to perceive a number 13.


title: Perception

text: Perceptual set has been demonstrated in many social contexts. When someone has a reputation for being funny, an audience is more likely to find them amusing. Individual's perceptual sets reflect their own personality traits. For example, people with an aggressive personality are quicker to correctly identify aggressive words or situations.


title: Perception

text: One classic psychological experiment showed slower reaction times and less accurate answers when a deck of playing cards reversed the color of the suit symbol for some cards (e.g. red spades and black hearts).


title: Perception

text: Philosopher Andy Clark explains that perception, although it occurs quickly, is not simply a bottom-up process (where minute details are put together to form larger wholes). Instead, our brains use what he calls "predictive coding". It starts with very broad constraints and expectations for the state of the world, and as expectations are met, it makes more detailed predictions (errors lead to new predictions, or "learning processes)". Clark says this research has various implications; not only can there be no completely "unbiased, unfiltered" perception, but this means that there is a great deal of feedback between perception and expectation (perceptual experiences often shape our beliefs, but those perceptions were based on existing beliefs). Indeed, predictive coding provides an account where this type of feedback assists in stabilizing our inference-making process about the physical world, such as with perceptual constancy examples.


title: Perception

text: Embodied cognition challenges the idea of perception as internal representations resulting from a passive reception of (incomplete) sensory inputs coming from the outside world. According to O'Regan (1992), the major issue with this perspective is that it leaves the subjective character of perception unexplained. Thus, perception is understood as an active process conducted by perceiving and engaged agents (perceivers). Furthermore, perception is influenced by agents' motives and expectations, their bodily states, and the interaction between the agent's body and the environment around it.


title: Mary II of England

text: Mary II (30 April 166228 December 1694) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, co-reigning with her husband, William III & II, from 1689 until her death in 1694.


title: Mary II of England

text: Mary was the eldest daughter of James, Duke of York, and his first wife Anne Hyde. Mary and her sister Anne were raised as Anglicans at the behest of their uncle, King Charles II, although their parents both converted to Roman Catholicism. Charles lacked legitimate children, making Mary second in the line of succession. She married her first cousin, William of Orange, a Protestant, in 1677. Charles died in 1685 and James took the throne, making Mary heir presumptive. James's attempts at rule by decree and the birth of his son from a second marriage, James Francis Edward (later known as "the Old Pretender"), led to his deposition in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the adoption of the English Bill of Rights.


title: Mary II of England

text: William and Mary became king and queen regnant. Mary mostly deferred to her husband – a renowned military leader and principal opponent of Louis XIV – when he was in England. She did, however, act alone when William was engaged in military campaigns abroad, proving herself to be a powerful, firm, and effective ruler. Mary's death from smallpox at the age of 32 left William as sole ruler until his death in 1702, when he was succeeded by Mary's sister, Anne.


title: Mary II of England

text: Mary, born at St James's Palace in London on 30 April 1662, was the eldest daughter of the Duke of York (the future King James II & VII), and his first wife, Anne Hyde. Mary's uncle was Charles II, who ruled the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland; her maternal grandfather, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, served for a lengthy period as Charles's chief advisor. She was baptised into the Anglican faith in the Chapel Royal at St James's, and was named after her ancestor, Mary, Queen of Scots. Her godparents included her father's cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Although her mother bore eight children, all except Mary and her younger sister Anne died very young, and Charles II had no legitimate children. Consequently, for most of her childhood, Mary was second in line to the throne after her father.


title: Mary II of England

text: The Duke of York converted to Roman Catholicism in 1668 or 1669 and the Duchess about eight years earlier, but Mary and Anne were brought up as Anglicans, pursuant to the command of Charles II. They were moved to their own establishment at Richmond Palace, where they were raised by their governess Lady Frances Villiers, with only occasional visits to see their parents at St James's or their grandfather Lord Clarendon at Twickenham. Mary's education, from private tutors, was largely restricted to music, dance, drawing, French, and religious instruction. Her mother died in 1671, and her father remarried in 1673, taking as his second wife Mary of Modena, a Catholic who was only four years older than Mary.


title: Mary II of England

text: From about the age of nine until her marriage, Mary wrote passionate letters to an older girl, Frances Apsley, the daughter of courtier Sir Allen Apsley. Mary signed herself 'Mary Clorine'; Apsley was 'Aurelia'. In time, Frances became uncomfortable with the correspondence, and replied more formally. At the age of fifteen, Mary became betrothed to her cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William III of Orange. William was the son of the King's late sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and thus fourth in the line of succession after James, Mary, and Anne. At first, Charles II opposed the alliance with the Dutch ruler—he preferred that Mary wed the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Louis, thus allying his realms with Catholic France and strengthening the odds of an eventual Catholic successor in Britain—but later, under pressure from Parliament and with a coalition with the Catholic French no longer politically favourable, he approved the proposed union. The Duke of York agreed to the marriage, after pressure from chief minister Lord Danby and the King, who incorrectly assumed that it would improve James's popularity among Protestants. When James told Mary that she was to marry her cousin, "she wept all that afternoon and all the following day".


title: Mary II of England

text: William and a tearful Mary were married in St James's Palace by Bishop Henry Compton on 4 November 1677. The bedding ceremony to publicly establish the consummation of the marriage was attended by the royal family, with her uncle the King himself drawing the bedcurtains. Mary accompanied her husband on a rough sea crossing to the Netherlands later that month, after a delay of two weeks caused by bad weather. Rotterdam was inaccessible because of ice, and they were forced to land at the small village of Ter Heijde, and walk through the frosty countryside until met by coaches to take them to Huis Honselaarsdijk. On 14 December, they made a formal entry to The Hague in a grand procession.