text: Bishop was charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. On September 11, 2012, she pleaded guilty to the above charges after family members of victims petitioned the judge against use of the death penalty. The jury heard a condensed version of the evidence on September 24, as required by Alabama law. That same day, Bishop was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.


title: University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting

text: In March 2009, Bishop had been denied tenure at UAH, making spring 2010 her last semester there, per university policy. Due to the attention Bishop attracted as a result of the shooting, previous violent incidents in which she had been involved or implicated were reevaluated. In 1986, she shot and killed her brother in Braintree, Massachusetts, in an incident officially ruled an accident. She was also questioned, along with her husband, after a 1993 pipe bomb incident directed toward her lab supervisor.


text: The day of the shooting, Amy Bishop taught her anatomy and neurosciences class at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). A student later stated Bishop "seemed perfectly normal" during the lecture. Bishop then attended a biology department faculty meeting on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. According to witnesses, twelve or thirteen people attended the meeting, which was described as "an ordinary faculty meeting." Bishop's behavior was also described as "normal" just prior to the shooting.


text: She sat quietly at the meeting for thirty or forty minutes before pulling out a Ruger P95 9mm handgun just before 4:00 p.m. A witness said that Bishop "got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us. She started with the one closest to her, and went down the row shooting her targets in the head." Another survivor said, "This wasn't random shooting around the room; this was execution style." Those who were shot were on one side of the oval table; the five on the other side dropped to the floor.


text: After Bishop had fired several rounds, Debra Moriarity, a biochemistry professor, said that she pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger, but heard only a "click," as her gun "either jammed or ran out of ammunition." She described Bishop as initially appearing "angry," then "perplexed." Joseph Ng, an associate professor, said Moriarity attempted to stop Bishop by approaching her and asking her to stop, and helped the other survivors push Bishop from the room and block the door. Ng said, "Moriarity was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush."


text: The suspected murder weapon was found in a bathroom on the second floor of the science building. Bishop did not have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. She was arrested a few minutes later outside the building. Shortly after her arrest, Bishop was quoted as saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way." When asked about the deaths of her colleagues, Bishop replied, "There's no way. They're still alive."


text: Police interviewed Bishop's husband, James Anderson, after it was determined that she had called him to pick her up after the shooting; they did not charge him. The couple were seen leaving their home with duffel bags on Friday afternoon prior to the shooting. Anderson revealed that his wife had borrowed the gun used in the shooting and that he had escorted her to an indoor shooting range in the weeks prior to the incident.


text: Shortly after Bishop's arrest, there was concern that she had "booby trapped the science building with a 'herpes bomb'" intended to spread the virus. She had worked with the herpes virus during her post-doctoral studies, and had written a novel describing the spread of a virus similar to herpes throughout the world. The police had already searched the premises, finding only the murder weapon.


text: Three faculty members were killed, and three others were injured. Only a few students were present in the building at the time of the shooting, though none were harmed. A memorial service was held at UAH on Friday, February 19, 2010, with 3,000 people in attendance.


text: Amy Bishop (born April 24, 1965; age 44 at the time of the shooting) is married to Jimmy "James" Anderson and is the mother of four children. She grew up in Massachusetts, attended Braintree High School, and completed her undergraduate degree at Northeastern University in Boston, where her father, Samuel Bishop, was a professor in the art department. She earned her Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University.


text: Bishop's 1993 dissertation at Harvard was titled "The role of methoxatin (PQQ) in the respiratory burst of phagocytes." Her research interests include induction of adaptive resistance to nitric oxide in the central nervous system and utilization of motor neurons for the development of neural circuits grown on biological computer chips. An anonymous source at Harvard stated that Bishop's work was of poor quality and undeserving of a doctoral degree, calling it "local scandal No. 1."


text: Bishop joined the faculty of UAH's Department of Biological Sciences as an assistant professor in 2003; she was teaching five courses prior to the shooting. Previously, she was an instructor at Harvard Medical School. She and her husband's "portable cell incubator" came in third in a technology competition, winning $25,000. Prodigy Biosystems, where Anderson is employed, raised $1.25 million to develop the automated cell incubator. David Williams, president of UAH, considered that the incubator "[would] change the way biological and medical research is conducted," but some scientists consulted by the press declared it unnecessary and too expensive.


text: Bishop, a second cousin of the novelist John Irving, had written three unpublished novels. One featured a woman scientist working to defeat a pandemic virus, and struggling with suicidal thoughts at the threat of not earning tenure. The novels reportedly "reveal a deep preoccupation with the concept of deliverance from sin." Bishop was a member of the Hamilton Writer's Group while living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s and was said to believe that writing would be "her ticket out of academia." Members of the club said she "would frequently cite her Harvard degree and family ties to Irving to boost her credential as a serious writer." Another member described her as smart but abrasive in her interactions and as feeling "entitled to praise." Bishop had a literary agent, although she had not published any books.


text: Several colleagues had expressed concern over Bishop's behavior. She was described as interrupting meetings with "bizarre tangents... left field kind of stuff," being "strange," and, notably, "crazy." One of these colleagues was a member of Bishop's tenure review committee. After her tenure was denied and she learned that this colleague referred to her as "crazy," Bishop filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging sex discrimination, citing the professor's remark to be used as possible evidence. The professor did not retract his comments:


text: The professor was given the opportunity to back off the claim, or to say it was a flippant remark. But he didn't. 'I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that,' the professor said. 'This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren't normal ... she was out of touch with reality.'


text: Bishop was reportedly a poor instructor and unpopular among her students. She dismissed several graduate students from her lab, and others sought transfers out. In 2009, several UAH students said they complained to administrators about Bishop on at least three occasions, saying she was "ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways." A petition signed by "dozens of students" was sent to the department head. The complaints, however, did not result in any classroom changes. Also in 2009, Bishop published an article in a vanity-press medical journal listing her husband and three minor children as co-authors. The article was later removed from the journal website.


text: As explained by Williams, the university president, after Bishop was denied tenure in March 2009, she could not expect to have her teaching contract renewed after March 2010. She appealed the decision to UAH's administration. Without reviewing the content of the tenure application, they determined that the process was carried out according to policy and denied the appeal. The routine faculty meeting at which Bishop opened fire was unrelated to her tenure.


text: Bishop's husband said the denial of tenure had been "an issue" in recent months and described the tenure process as "a long, basically hard fight." He said that it was his understanding that Bishop "exceeded the qualifications for tenure" and that she was distressed at the likelihood of losing her position barring a successful appeal. She approached members of the University of Alabama System's board of trustees, and hired a lawyer who was "finding one problem after another with the process." One point of dispute was whether two of her papers had been published in time to count toward tenure. Bishop, who gave more weight to obtaining patents rather than publishing papers, reportedly received several warnings that she needed to publish more to receive tenure.


text: In 1986, at the age of 21, Bishop fatally shot her 18-year-old brother Seth at their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. Bishop fired two shots from a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun (one into her bedroom wall, then one into her brother's chest). Later, she pointed the gun at a moving vehicle on the adjacent road and tried to get into the vehicle.


text: Bishop and her mother told police the shooting had been an accident. Police found a live round in the gun's chamber, meaning that Bishop must have racked its slide after shooting her brother. After a brief inquiry into the incident by the Massachusetts State Police in 1986 (reported in 1987), they repeated the Braintree police department's initial assessment that the shooting was accidental. Norfolk County District Attorney Bill Delahunt, later elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, did not file charges. Detailed records of the shooting had disappeared by 1988. Braintree police chief Paul Frazier said on February 13, 2010, "The report's gone, removed from the files."


text: After speaking with officers involved with the case in 1986, Frazier called the "accident" description inaccurate. He and others said that then-chief John Polio had ordered Bishop released to her mother Judy, who was allegedly a political supporter of the chief as a member of the Braintree town council. They said that Bishop had demanded to meet with Polio personally after the arrest instead of being charged for the shooting. Frazier was not on duty during the incident but recalled "how frustrated the members of the department were over the release" of Bishop.


text: Other officers, Frazier said, believed that Polio had "fix[ed] a murder," resulting in what he described as "a miscarriage of justice. Just because it was a friend of his." The now-retired Polio denied that there had been a cover-up. Frazier's 2010 account and the 1987 Massachusetts State Police report differ in several key details, including whether Bishop had been arguing with her brother or with her father before the shooting.


text: On February 16, 2010, Braintree officials announced that the files previously missing had been located, and Norfolk County District Attorney William Keating concluded that probable cause existed in 1986 to arrest and charge Bishop for crimes committed after she fled the house. She had taken the shotgun to a nearby auto dealership shop and brandished it at two employees in an attempt to get a car. She could have been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon, and unlawful possession of ammunition. The statute of limitations has expired on each of these charges.


text: The most serious charge considered in 1986 was manslaughter for the death of her brother. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick ordered the state police to review their investigation, saying, "It is critical that we provide as clear an understanding as possible about all aspects of this case and its investigation to ensure that where mistakes were made they are not repeated in the future." An investigation was opened in which the state cooperated with the Norfolk County District Attorney's office to assess the state, local police, and then-DA's handling of the case.


text: On February 25, 2010, Keating sent a letter to District Court Judge Mark Coven to start a judicial inquest into the 1986 shooting. Keating said that recently enlarged crime scene photos from Bishop's bedroom reveal a news article in which a similar crime was reported. He speculated that this article may relate to Bishop's intent. Keating did not identify the specific news article, but "The Boston Globe" wrote that an Internet search revealed that "two weeks earlier, the parents of Patrick Duffy, the actor who played Bobby Ewing on the popular television show "Dallas", were killed in Montana by an assailant wielding a 12-gauge shotgun, who then held up a car dealership, stole a pickup truck, and fled."


text: On March 1, 2010, Detective Brian Howe, the lead investigator for the state police in the 1986 shooting, said he looked forward to addressing the judicial inquest and stood by his 1987 report. He had agreed with Captain Theodore Buker, the late Braintree lead investigator, that the shooting was accidental. Howe said he was assigned to the case nearly two hours after the shooting and immediately called Braintree police. Buker told him that he would not be needed that day and that Bishop had already been released into her parents' custody. Howe stated that Braintree police never informed him that she had later allegedly accosted employees at a car dealership at gunpoint, demanding a car. Howe said that he repeatedly requested the December 6 incident reports from the Braintree police, but never received them.


text: On March 1, 2010, Keating announced that an inquest would be held April 13–16, 2010. Judge Coven, first justice of Quincy District Court, was scheduled to hold the inquest. During the inquest, Braintree police officers testified that Judy Bishop had asked for Polio by name before the officers were ordered to release Amy Bishop. Judy, Polio, and his wife all testified that Judy and Polio had not been friends, and Judy denied that she had asked for Polio at the station.


text: On June 16, 2010, Amy Bishop was charged with first degree murder in her brother's death, nearly 24 years after his shooting. Keating commented, "I can't give you any explanations, I can't give you excuses, because there are none. Jobs weren't done, responsibilities weren't met and justice wasn't served." Bishop's parents, who claim that the Braintree officers lied about the events at the station, issued a statement after the indictment. They wrote, "We cannot explain or even understand what happened in Alabama. However, we know that what happened 23 years ago to our son, Seth, was an accident."


text: The protagonist of the first of Bishop's unpublished novels is a woman who, as a child, attempted to frighten a friend after an argument but accidentally killed the friend's brother. Patrick Radden Keefe has speculated, after reviewing the evidence, that Bishop had meant to frighten or shoot her father with the shotgun after an argument and mistook her brother for him.


text: In 1993, Bishop and her husband were suspected of sending two letter-bombs, which failed to explode, to Paul Rosenberg, a Harvard Medical School professor. Rosenberg was Bishop's supervisor at a Children's Hospital neurobiology lab and had given a negative evaluation to Bishop, who resigned from her position. Bishop was afterward said to be "on the verge of a nervous breakdown,"


text: In 2002, Bishop assaulted a woman who had taken the last booster seat at an International House of Pancakes. When the woman refused to give up the seat, Bishop punched her in the head while yelling, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop!" Bishop pleaded guilty and received probation;


text: prosecutors recommended that Bishop attend anger management classes. Her husband said she had never attended anger management classes.


text: Following the Huntsville shooting, Bishop was charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. The police confiscated her computer, her family's minivan, and a large binder containing documents pertaining to her "tenure battle." She secured an unnamed attorney, and was held at Madison County jail without bail. Her court-appointed attorney was Roy W. Miller. Prosecutors said almost from the outset that they would seek the death penalty. According to state law regarding sentencing for capital murder, Bishop was eligible for either the death penalty or life in prison.


text: On February 15, during a closed-door hearing presided over by an Alabama judge, the charges were read to Bishop. Following the hearing, Bishop was on suicide watch, a standard procedure in such cases. Her husband said she called him prior to her arraignment and they spoke for approximately two minutes. He said, "She seems to be doing OK." On March 12, while executing a search warrant on Bishop's residence, the police discovered a "suspicious device" prompting an evacuation of the nearby neighborhood; it was later identified by the bomb squad as non-explosive.


text: Miller visited Bishop in jail and said she did not remember the shooting and was "very cogent" but seemed to recognize that "she has a loose grip on reality." Initially, he said Bishop had severe mental health issues that appear to be paranoid schizophrenia, but later retracted that statement, saying "he had spoken out of turn." In February 2013, Bishop told Keefe that she was being treated for paranoid schizophrenia with haloperidol. Miller told a reporter for "The New York Times" that, "This is not a whodunit. This lady has committed this offense or offenses in front of the world. It gets to be a question in my mind of her mental capacity at the time, or her mental state at the time that these acts were committed." Miller said he would be enlisting the help of one or more psychiatrists to examine his client, who said this was not the first time she had no recollection of something that had happened. He said he did not know if Bishop was insane; determining whether she was culpable for her actions would be left to a psychiatrist. He did say that she was "very sorry for what she's done."


text: On June 18, two days after Bishop was indicted for the murder of her brother in a re-opened case, she attempted suicide in Huntsville jail. She survived and was treated at a hospital and then returned to jail; her husband complained that authorities did not inform him of the incident.


text: In November 2010, survivors Leahy and Monticciolo filed lawsuits against Bishop and Anderson to recover damages. In January 2011, attorneys representing Davis' and Johnson's families filed wrongful death lawsuits against Bishop, Anderson, and UAH. In September 2011, Bishop pleaded not guilty by means of the insanity defense.


text: In 2012, the spouse of one of the murdered researchers wrote a letter to the judge presiding over the case. In this letter, the writer indicated the researcher's family had greatly suffered from its loss but did not see any benefit from the loss of another life. In response to this letter, Bishop's lawyers offered to change her plea to guilty in exchange for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty. Upon receiving this offer, chief prosecutor Robert Broussard contacted and learned from the nine survivors that none of them wanted the death sentence for Bishop. On the basis of these opinions, Broussard decided not to seek the death penalty. Bishop then changed her plea to guilty.


text: On September 24, 2012, Bishop was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Norfolk County declined to seek her extradition. Bishop stated through her Massachusetts lawyer that she wanted to be tried for her brother's death in order to vindicate herself. Bishop is serving her sentence at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama. her security classification is medium and her residence is a dormitory instead of a cell block.


text: After pleading guilty in September 2012 and waiving her right to appeal, Bishop filed an appeal on February 11, 2013. The appeal stated that she was not informed of the rights she would be waiving by pleading guilty, that she was not correctly informed of the minimum range of punishment, and the circuit court failed to explain that she could withdraw her plea. On April 26, 2013, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama rejected the appeal; they stated that Bishop failed to challenge the validity of her guilty pleas in the circuit court and did not file either a motion to withdraw her pleas or a motion for a new trial.


text: On April 18, 2021, Bishop's 20-year-old son Seth Anderson (who was named for the brother she murdered) was shot dead in Huntsville. The shooter was charged with manslaughter.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: Bo-Katan Kryze is a fictional character in the "Star Wars" franchise. She was introduced in the computer-animated television series "", in which she was voiced by Katee Sackhoff. Sackhoff subsequently reprised her role in the sequel series "Star Wars Rebels", and made her live-action debut as the character in the Disney+ series "The Mandalorian".


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: In "The Clone Wars", Bo-Katan is a member of the Death Watch, a terrorist faction of Mandalorians who wish to restore the ancient warrior ways of their planet, Mandalore. She is also the sister of Duchess Satine Kryze, the pacifist ruler of Mandalore, from whom she is estranged due to various differences in their personal politics. She later allies herself with former Jedi Ahsoka Tano and the Galactic Republic in liberating Mandalore from Darth Maul. In "Rebels", Bo-Katan is gifted the Darksaber by Sabine Wren and declared the new ruler of Mandalore, while in "The Mandalorian", she seeks to recover the Darksaber from Moff Gideon after the Purge of Mandalore.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: On January 13, 2012, Bo-Katan Kryze first appeared in the "" episode "A Friend in Need," voiced by Katee Sackhoff. Although not originally included in the script for the episode, director Dave Filoni added the character to set up a greater role in the series' . Due to the series' initial cancellation, and renewal years later, Bo-Katan would not reappear in "The Clone Wars" until the series' in 2020. During the hiatus between the and seventh seasons of "The Clone Wars", Bo-Katan appeared in several episodes of "Star Wars Rebels", in episodes set fifteen years after the events of "The Clone Wars".


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: Bo-Katan's name is a mnemonic riff on the words "boogie-cat-Anne" pronounced together, referring to the name of the cat belonging to Filoni's wife, herself named Anne. Bo-Katan is a warrior at her core, and left the politics of leadership to the diplomats like her sister Duchess Satine Kryze. She has her faults, and a strong sense of her own self importance, but she understands the Mandalorian warrior culture and over time grows into her role as a leader.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: On November 16, 2019, Sackhoff confirmed that she would portray Bo-Katan in live-action in the then-upcoming second season of "The Mandalorian", appearing in "", released on November 13, 2020. Costume designer Shawna Trpcic commissioned sculptor Jose Fernandez and his Ironhead Studios to build Mandalorian armor for Bo-Katan. Sackhoff had hoped to play the character in live action but expected that it would be recast with someone more famous such as Scarlett Johansson. When she finally wore the armor for the first time she was overwhelmed and cried with joy.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: Bo-Katan Kryze (voiced by Katee Sackhoff) first appeared in the of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars", in the episode "A Friend in Need" as the lieutenant of Death Watch, a terrorist group seeking to overthrow the pacifist government of Mandalore, under the leadership of Pre Vizsla (voiced by Jon Favreau). She leads the Nite Owls, an elite unit within the Death Watch. In this episode, Lux Bonteri meets with Death Watch on Carlac to join forces against Count Dooku. Ahsoka Tano and R2-D2 are forced to accompany him; they encounter Bo-Katan, who puts Ahsoka to work with women from a local village who have been enslaved by the Death Watch. Bo-Katan and the Death Watch later burn down the village and murder the innocent villagers. Ahsoka reveals herself as a Jedi and fights off the Death Watch before being taken prisoner, but is freed shortly after. While Ahsoka, R2-D2 and Lux escape towards their ship, Bo-Katan pursues them and tries to kill Ahsoka, but is defeated.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: Bo-Katan reappears in the episodes "Eminence", "Shades of Reason" and "The Lawless". In this story arc, the Death Watch ally themselves with Darth Maul and several crime syndicates (in an alliance known as the Shadow Collective) with the intent of performing false flag operations against the Mandalorian people in order to stage a coup against Duchess Satine Kryze, the pacifist ruler of Mandalore and Bo-Katan's sister. Bo-Katan believes that Sith are no better than Jedi and distrusts the gangsters, but is outvoted. Once the Death Watch conquers Mandalore, they betray Maul, but he challenges Vizsla to a duel for the right to rule Mandalore. Maul defeats Vizsla and kills him with his own Darksaber, but Bo-Katan refuses to accept an outsider as a ruler and flees with the Death Watch members loyal to her. They later save Satine, but the former Duchess is recaptured. Soon after, Obi-Wan Kenobi arrives on Mandalore to rescue her as well. Maul murders Satine and has Obi-Wan taken to prison; however, Bo-Katan and her forces free him. She helps him escape so that he may bring the forces of the Galactic Republic upon Mandalore to remove Maul from power.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: In the seventh and final season, Bo-Katan and the Nite Owls continue to fight against Maul. While on a mission on Oba Diah, Bo-Katan, Ursa Wren and another Nite Owl spot Ahsoka and follow her back to Coruscant, where Kryze puts aside her differences and recruits her. Ahsoka and Bo-Katan contact Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, requesting that the Republic assist them in reclaiming Mandalore from Maul. Though reluctant at first, the Jedi decide to send a division of the 501st Legion under Commander Rex to stage an invasion that becomes known as the Siege of Mandalore. They succeed in overthrowing Maul and Bo-Katan is declared regent.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: Bo-Katan returns in the "Star Wars Rebels" fourth-season premiere and television film "Heroes of Mandalore". During the Galactic Empire's occupation of Mandalore, Bo-Katan refused to serve the Empire and was forced to abdicate, being replaced by Clan Saxon. Seeing herself as unworthy to lead, she initially refuses the Darksaber from Sabine Wren, who recovered it from Maul. In "Heroes of Mandalore", Bo-Katan and her Mandalorian allies combine efforts with the "Ghost" crew in destroying "The Duchess", a weapon created by Sabine that is capable of destroying Beskar armor. Governor Tiber Saxon captures Sabine and Bo-Katan, threatening to kill Kryze if Wren does not upgrade the weapon. Sabine reprograms the weapon to target stormtrooper armor and kill Saxon, but Bo-Katan warns her against sinking to the Empire's level. Heeding Bo-Katan, Sabine destroys the weapon and allows the Rebels to free Mandalore from the Empire's control. Bo-Katan eventually accepts the Darksaber from Sabine, becoming the ruler of Mandalore once more as the surviving Mandalorians pledge loyalty to her.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: Sackhoff reprises her role in the second season of "The Mandalorian", appearing in "" for the character's first live-action appearance. Caitlin Dechelle and Caitlin Hutson served as her stunt doubles.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: In Chapter 11, Bo-Katan, Koska Reeves and Axe Woves rescue Din Djarin and the Child from a group of Quarren. They remove their helmets and Bo-Katan explains her history, also revealing to Djarin that he is a Child of the Watch, a cult of zealots that follow the strict ancient rules known as "the Way". Because they do not follow "the Way", Djarin distrusts them and rejects their help. After they save him a second time, he agrees to help them seize weapons from an Imperial freighter, and Bo-Katan agrees to tell the Mandalorian where he can find a Jedi. During the raid, Bo-Katan interrogates the captain, wanting to know the whereabouts of Moff Gideon and if he has the Darksaber. Afterwards, she offers Djarin the chance to join them despite their differences but he chooses to continue his quest. Bo-Katan tells him that he will find Ahsoka Tano in the city of Calodan on the planet of Corvus.


title: Bo-Katan Kryze

text: In "", the Mandalorian and Boba Fett approach Bo-Katan and Koska at a cantina to recruit them in their mission to rescue Grogu (The Child) from Moff Gideon. Bo-Katan is initially hostile to Boba and calls him a disgrace to his Mandalorian armor, since he is a clone. Nevertheless, she breaks a scuffle between Boba and Koska and agrees to help the Mandalorian under the condition that she will get Gideon's cruiser and the Darksaber from him, and the Mandalorian considers helping her to liberate Mandalore. The Mandalorian bests Gideon in combat, spoiling her plan to win back the Darksaber in combat herself. He attempts to surrender the weapon to her, but is told by Gideon that it must be won in combat. Bo-Katan does not accept the Darksaber from the Mandalorian.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Anti-Irish sentiment includes oppression, persecution, discrimination, or hatred of Irish people as an ethnic group or a nation. It can be directed against the island of Ireland in general, or directed against Irish emigrants and their descendants in the Irish diaspora. This sentiment can also be called Hibernophobia.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: It is traditionally rooted in the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Age and the Age of Enlightenment and it is also evidenced in Irish immigration to Great Britain, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Anti-Irish sentiment can include social, racial and cultural discrimination in Ireland itself, such as sectarianism or cultural, religious and political conflicts such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: The most famous example of Anti-Irish sentiment comes from 1190 with the Norman chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis, also known as Gerald of Wales. To justify the Norman invasion of Ireland in line with the goals of Henry II, he wrote disparagingly of the Irish.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Over the centuries, hostility increased towards the Irish, who steadfastly remained Roman Catholic in spite of coercive force by Edward VI and subsequent rulers to convert them to Protestantism. The religious majority of the Irish nation was ruled by a religious minority, leading to perennial social conflict. During the Great Famine in the middle of the 19th century, some evangelical Protestants sought to convert the starving Catholics as part of their relief efforts.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Negative English attitudes towards the Gaelic Irish and their culture date as far back as the reign of Henry II of England. In 1155, Pope Adrian IV (himself an Englishman) issued the papal bull called "Laudabiliter", that gave Henry permission to conquer Ireland as a means of strengthening the Papacy's control over the Irish Church. Pope Adrian called the Irish a "rude and barbarous" nation. Thus, the Norman invasion of Ireland began in 1169 with the backing of the Papacy. Pope Alexander III, who was Pope at the time of the invasion, ratified the "Laudabiliter" and gave Henry dominion over Ireland. He likewise called the Irish a "barbarous nation" with "filthy practices".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Gerald of Wales accompanied King Henry's son, John, on his 1185 trip to Ireland. As a result of this he wrote "Topographia Hibernica" ("Topography of Ireland") and "Expugnatio Hibernia" ("Conquest of Ireland"), both of which remained in circulation for centuries afterwards. Ireland, in his view, was rich; but the Irish were backward and lazy:


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: They use their fields mostly for pasture. Little is cultivated and even less is sown. The problem here is not the quality of the soil but rather the lack of industry on the part of those who should cultivate it. This laziness means that the different types of minerals with which hidden veins of the earth are full are neither mined nor exploited in any way. They do not devote themselves to the manufacture of flax or wool, nor to the practice of any mechanical or mercantile act. Dedicated only to leisure and laziness, this is a truly barbarous people. They depend on animals for their livelihood and they live like animals.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Gerald's views were not atypical, and similar views may be found in the writings of William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh. When it comes to Irish marital and sexual customs Gerald is even more biting: "This is a filthy people, wallowing in vice. They indulge in incest, for example in marrying – or rather debauching – the wives of their dead brothers". Even earlier than this Archbishop Anselm accused the Irish of "wife swapping", "exchanging their wives as freely as other men exchange their horses".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: One will find these views echoed centuries later in the words of Sir Henry Sidney, twice Lord Deputy of Ireland during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and in those of Edmund Tremayne, his secretary. In Tremayne's view the Irish "commit whoredom, hold no wedlock, ravish, steal and commit all abomination without scruple of conscience". In "A View of the Present State of Ireland", circulated in 1596 but not published until 1633, the English official and renowned poet Edmund Spenser wrote "They are all papists by profession but in the same so blindingly and brutishly informed that you would rather think them atheists or infidels". In a "Brief Note on Ireland," Spenser argued that "Great force must be the instrument but famine must be the means, for till Ireland be famished it cannot be subdued. . . There can be no conformity of government where is no conformity of religion. . . There can be no sound agreement between two equal contraries viz: the English and Irish".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Anti-Irish sentiments played a role in atrocities perpetrated against the Irish. For instance, in 1305, Piers Bermingham received a financial bonus and accolades in verse after beheading thirty members of the O'Conor clan and sending them to Dublin. In 1317, one Irish chronicler opined that it was just as easy for an Englishman to kill an Irishman or English woman to kill an Irish woman as he would a dog. The Irish were thought of as the most barbarous people in Europe, and such ideas were modified to compare the Scottish Highlands or Gàidhealtachd where traditionally Scottish Gaelic is spoken to medieval Ireland.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In the Early Modern period following the advent of Protestantism in Great Britain, Irish Catholics suffered both social and political discrimination for refusing to renounce Catholicism. This discrimination sometimes manifested itself in areas with large Puritan or Presbyterian populations such as the northeastern parts of Ireland, the Central Belt of Scotland, and parts of Canada. Thinly veiled nationalism under the guise of religious conflict has occurred in both the UK and Ireland.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Anti-Irish sentiment is found in works by several 18th-century writers such as the French philosopher Voltaire, who depicted the Catholic Irish as savage and backward, and defended British rule in the country.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Anti-Irish sentiments in Victorian Britain and 19th century United States manifested themselves the stereotyping of the Irish as violent and alcoholic. Magazines such as "Punch" portrayed the Irish as having "bestial, ape-like or demonic features and the Irishman, (especially the political radical) was invariably given a long or prognathous jaw, the stigmata to the phrenologists of a lower evolutionary order, degeneracy, or criminality."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, a fall in agricultural prices occurred. During the ensuing depression, farmers in southern England were not able to pay their agricultural workers a sustainable wage. There was an excess of labour compounded by the men returning from the wars. In 1829 added to this mix, was an unprecedented influx of migrant Irish workers who were prepared to work for half what their English counterparts were earning. On the Isle of Thanet the local farm labourers rounded up the Irish workers. William Cobbett wrote:


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Irish labourers were singled out in particular, for rough treatment by the locals. Farms employing Irish labour were subject to violent threats and incendiarism. There were similar problems in 1830, however eventually the farmers became the target for attacks, rather than the Irish, in the disturbances that became known as the Swing Riots.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Similar to other immigrant populations, they were sometimes accused of cronyism and subjected to misrepresentations of their religious and cultural beliefs. Irish Catholics were particularly singled out for attack by Protestants. Anti-Catholicism, whether real or imagined, played to the Catholic respect for martyrdom, and was partly based on a fear of a reborn Inquisition whose methods clashed with the "Age of Enlightenment". Irish Catholics were not involved in formulating church dogma, but it became a stick to beat them with. Mostly they stayed with their church as it fostered a sense of community in an otherwise harsh commercial world.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In Liverpool, England, where many Irish immigrants settled following the Great Famine, anti-Irish prejudice was widespread. The sheer numbers of people coming across the Irish sea and settling in the poorer districts of the city led to physical attacks and it became common practice for those with Irish accents or even Irish names to be barred from jobs, public houses and employment opportunities.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 1882, five people were murdered in the Maamtrasna, on the border between County Mayo and County Galway in Ireland. Covering the incident, "The Spectator" wrote the following:


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Nineteenth-century Protestant American "Nativist" discrimination against Irish Catholics reached a peak in the mid-1850s when the Know-Nothing Movement tried to oust Catholics from public office. Henry Winter Davis, an active Know-Nothing, was elected on the new "American Party" ticket to Congress from Maryland. He told Congress that the un-American Irish Catholic immigrants were to blame for the recent election of Democrat James Buchanan as president, stating: The recent election has developed in an aggravated form every evil against which the American party protested. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country -- men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election. Again in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign-born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Much of the opposition came from Irish Protestants, as in the 1831 riots in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Protestants of the nineteenth century would use crime statistics to allege that Irish Catholics were over-represented in crime. There were theories that the over-representation was due to a lack of morality stemming from Catholic religious belief, and other theories that Catholics were racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons. A.B. Forwood (1893) of the Liverpool Conservative Party stated, The influx of the Irish into Liverpool brought poverty, disease, dirt and misery; drunkenness and crime, in addition to a disturbance of the labour market, the cost to ratepayers of an enormous sum of money.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: During the 1830s in the U.S., riots for control of job sites broke out in rural areas among rival labour teams from different parts of Ireland, and between Irish and local American work teams competing for construction jobs.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Irish Catholics were isolated and marginalized by Protestant society, but the Irish gained control of the Catholic Church from English, French and Germans. Intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants was strongly discouraged by both Protestant ministers and Catholic priests. Catholics, led by the Irish, built a network of parochial schools and colleges, as well as orphanages and hospitals, typically using nuns as an inexpensive work force. They thereby avoided public institutions mostly controlled by Protestants.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: The Irish used their base in Tammany Hall (the Democratic Party machine in New York City) to play a role in the New York State legislature. Young Theodore Roosevelt was their chief Republican opponent, and he wrote in his diary that:


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: After 1860, many Irish sang songs about signs and notices reading "Help wanted – no Irish need apply" or similar. The 1862 protest song "No Irish Need Apply", written and performed by Mrs F. R. Phillips, was inspired by such signs in London. Later Irish Americans adapted the lyrics and the songs to reflect the discrimination they felt in America.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Historians have debated the issue of anti-Irish job discrimination in the United States. Some insist that the "No Irish need apply" (or "NINA") signs were common, but others, such as Richard J. Jensen, argue that anti-Irish job discrimination was not a significant factor in the United States, and these signs and print advertisements were posted by the limited number of early 19th-century English immigrants to the United States who shared the prejudices of their homeland. In July 2015 the same journal that published Jensen's 2002 paper published a rebuttal by Rebecca A. Fried, an 8th-grade student at Sidwell Friends School. She listed multiple instances of the restriction used in advertisements for many different types of positions, including "clerks at stores and hotels, bartenders, farm workers, house painters, hog butchers, coachmen, bookkeepers, blackers, workers at lumber yards, upholsterers, bakers, gilders, tailors, and papier mache workers, among others." While the greatest number of NINA instances occurred in the 1840s, Fried found instances for its continued use throughout the subsequent century, with the most recent dating to 1909 in Butte, Montana.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Alongside "No Irish Need Apply" signs, in the post-World War II years, signs saying "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" or similar anti-Irish sentiment are reported to begin to appear in the United Kingdom.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In July 1905 the British Parliament attempted to introduce the Drunkenness (Ireland) Bill which aimed to provide financial protection to the spouses of "habitual drunkards" and set penalties for adults who were found to be drunk while caring for children. The Irish Nationalist MP for South Louth, Joseph Nolan, said that the "very title 'Drunkenness (Ireland) Bill' was offensive" and that he "resented any special measure of this kind being brought forward to deal with drunkenness in Ireland which was not applicable to Great Britain as well."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: According to a 2004 report by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, Irish soldiers serving in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) during World War I were treated more harshly in courts-martial because "British military courts were anti-Irish".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: The American writer H. P. Lovecraft held very anti-Irish views. In 1921, concerning the possibility of an independent Irish state, he said the following: "If the Irish had the ‘right’ to independence they would possess it. If they ever gain it, they will possess it – until they lose it again. England has the right to rule because she does... It is not chance, but racial superiority, which has made the Briton supreme. Why have not the Irish conquered and colonized the earth if they be so deserving of regard? They are brainless canaille."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 1923, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved a report entitled "The Menace of the Irish race to our Scottish Nationality", which called for "means to be found to preserve Scotland and the Scottish race and to secure in future generations the traditions, ideals and faith of a great people, unspoiled and inviolate."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 1934, writer J. B. Priestley published the travelogue "English Journey", in which he wrote "A great many speeches have been made and books written on the subject of what England has done to Ireland... I should be interested to hear a speech and read a book or two on the subject of what Ireland has done to England... if we do have an Irish Republic as our neighbour, and it is found possible to return her exiled citizens, what a grand clearance there will be in all the western ports, from the Clyde to Cardiff, what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 2002, English journalist Julie Burchill narrowly escaped prosecution for incitement to racial hatred, following a column in "The Guardian" where she described Ireland as being synonymous with "child molestation, Nazi-sympathising, and the oppression of women". She had expressed anti-Irish sentiment several times throughout her career, announcing in the London journal "Time Out", "I hate the Irish, I think they're appalling."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 2012, "The Irish Times" published a report on anti-Irish prejudice in Britain. It claimed that far-right British nationalist groups continued to use "anti-IRA" marches as "an excuse to attack and intimidate Irish immigrants". Shortly before the 2012 Summer Olympics, British athlete Daley Thompson was shown an image of a runner with a misspelt tattoo and said that the person responsible for the misspelling "must have been Irish". The BBC issued an apology.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In March 2012, a classified ad in Perth placed by a bricklayer stated that "no Irish" should apply for the job.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: On 8 August 2012, an article appeared in Australian newspapers titled "Punch Drunk: Ireland intoxicated as Taylor swings towards boxing gold". The article claimed that Katie Taylor was not "what you'd expect in a fighting Irishwoman, nor is she surrounded by people who'd prefer a punch to a potato". The journalist who wrote it apologised for "indulging racial stereotypes". The following day, Australian commentator Russell Barwick asserted that athletes from Ireland should compete for the British Olympic team, likening it to surfer from Hawaii "not surfing for the USA". When fellow presenter Mark Chapman explained that the Republic of Ireland was an independent state, Barwick remarked, "It's nothing but an Irish joke."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Since at least 2012, Greg Hodge, managing director of the dating website BeautifulPeople.com, has expressed anti-Irish sentiment on numerous occasions. In 2020, he said, "There are many examples of very handsome Irish men in Hollywood. However this is the exception and not the norm. Irish men are the undisputed ugliest in the world. They really are in a league of their own." His comments are often mocked.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: On 25 June 2013, an Irish flag was burned at an Orange Order headquarters in the Everton area of Liverpool. This was seen by members of Liverpool's Irish community, which is the biggest in the UK, as a hate crime.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In December 2014, British broadcaster Channel 4 caused an "outrage" and "fury" in Ireland and the UK when it planned a comedy series about the Irish Famine. The sitcom named "Hungry", was announced by writer Hugh Travers, who said "we’re kind of thinking of it as "Shameless" in famine Ireland." The response in Ireland was quick and negative: "Jewish people would never endorse making a comedy of the mass extermination of their ancestors at the hands of the Nazis, Cambodians would never support people laughing at what happened to their people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the people of Somalia, Ethiopia or Sudan would never accept the plight of their people, through generational famine, being the source of humour in Britain," Dublin councillor David McGuinness said. "I am not surprised that it is a British television outlet funding this venture." The writer defended the concept saying, "Comedy equals tragedy plus time." Channel 4 issued a press release stating that "This in the development process and is not currently planned to air... It's not unusual for sitcoms to exist against backdrops that are full of adversity and hardship". Protesters from the Irish community planned to picket the offices of Channel 4 and campaigners called the proposed show 'institutionalised anti-Irish racism'.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In January 2019, American rapper Azealia Banks made disparaging comments on Instagram about Irish people after getting into an argument with a flight attendant on an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin. She called Irish people "a bunch of prideful inbred leprechauns" and "barbarians". The following day, she said she would dedicate her Dublin show to "beautiful Irish women". However, following the show, Banks again attacked the Irish online and mocked the Irish Famine.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In March 2021, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said it had investigated British holiday park operator Pontins after a whistleblower revealed that Pontins maintained a blacklist of common Irish surnames to prevent Irish Travellers from entering its parks.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Since the formation of Northern Ireland in 1921, there have been tensions between Protestants, who tend to refer to themselves as British, and Catholics, who tend to refer to themselves as Irish.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 1988, John Taylor, the Ulster Unionist MP for Strangford, replied to a letter from Gearoid Ó Muilleoir, deputy president of the Student’s Union in Queen's University Belfast, relating to grants for students in Northern Ireland. Taylor’s letter said, "Since your surname is clearly unpronounceable I have, rightly or wrongly, concluded that you are Irish and not British. I therefore suggest that you, and those whom you represent, apply for any necessary grants to the Dublin Government."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Taylor later repudiated being Irish in a debate in Dublin: "We in Northern Ireland are not Irish. We do not jig at crossroads, speak Gaelic, play GAA etc… It is an insult for Dubliners to refer to us as being Irish."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: In 1999, Austin Currie, a former member of the SDLP from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, spoke in the Irish Parliament on the effect of partition on Catholics in Northern Ireland: "Partition was used to try to cut us off from the rest of the Irish nation. Unionists did their best to stamp out our nationalism and, the educational system, to the extent it could organise it, was oriented to Britain and we were not even allowed to use names such as Séamus or Seán. When my brothers' godparents went to register their birth, they were told no such names as Séamus or Seán existed in Northern Ireland and were asked for the English equivalent."


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Since the Troubles began in the late 1960s, loyalists have consistently expressed anti-Irish sentiment. Irish tricolours have been burned on the yearly Eleventh Night bonfires. In August 1993 the Red Hand Commando announced that it would attack pubs or hotels where Irish folk music is played, although it withdrew the threat shortly after. In 2000, loyalists made posters and banners that read "The Ulster conflict is about nationality. IRISH OUT!".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: The Provisional IRA's bombings in England led to fear, anti-Irish sentiment and attacks on the Irish community there. After the Birmingham pub bombings, for example, there were reports of isolated attacks on Irish people and Irish-owned businesses in the Australian press. In the 1990s, writers for the "Daily Mail" newspaper "called for Irish people to be banned from UK sporting events and fined for IRA disruption to public transport", one of numerous opinions expressed over many years which has led the "Daily Mail" to be accused by some in Ireland of publishing "some of the most virulently anti-Irish journalism in Britain for decades".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Irish Travellers are an ethnic and cultural minority group, who have been present in Ireland for centuries, and whose members experience overt discrimination throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom. Such discrimination is similar in nature to antiziganism (prejudice against Romani people) in the United Kingdom and Europe. Anti-Traveller racism is similar to the form of racism which was experienced by the Irish during the diaspora of the 19th century, with media attack campaigns in the United Kingdom and Ireland using both national/local newspapers and radio. Irish Travellers in the Irish media have stated they are living in Ireland under an apartheid regime. In 2013, Irish journalist Jennifer O'Connell, writing in "The Irish Times", wrote that "Our casual racism against Travellers is one of Ireland's last great shames". While there is a willingness to acknowledge that there is widespread prejudice towards Travellers in Irish society, and a recognition of discrimination against Travellers, there is still strong resistance among the Irish public to calling the treatment of Travellers racist.


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: Examples include the burning down of houses allocated to the Travellers by the state due to Traveller feuds. In 2013 a Traveller home in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal was destroyed by fire days before members of a Traveller family were due to move in. Local Councillor Pearse Doherty said the house was specifically targeted because it was to house a Traveller family and was destroyed due to a 'hatred of Travellers'. Another local Councillor Sean McEniff of Bundoran caused controversy and a complaint under the 'Incitement to Hatred Act' when he stated that, due to the house's initial purchase, Travellers "should live in isolation from the settled community." and "I would not like these people (the family) living beside me".


title: Anti-Irish sentiment

text: The British television series "Big Fat Gypsy Weddings" has been accused of bullying and an instigation of racial hatred against Irish Travellers in England. The series has faced a number of controversies, including allegations of racism in its advertising and instigating a rise in the rate of racially motivated bullying.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of Rainbow Books (named for their binding colors) that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan. The format gained worldwide acceptance in 1983–84, selling more than a million CD players in those two years, to play 22.5 million discs.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Beginning in the 2000s, CDs were increasingly being replaced by other forms of digital storage and distribution, with the result that by 2010 the number of audio CDs being sold in the U.S. had dropped about 50% from their peak; however, they remained one of the primary distribution methods for the music industry. In the 2010s, revenues from digital music services, such as iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube, matched those from physical format sales for the first time. According to the RIAA's midyear report in 2020, phonograph record revenues surpassed those of CDs for the first time since the 1980s.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The optophone, first presented in 1931, was an early device which used light for both recording and playback of sound signals on a transparent photograph. More than thirty years later, American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital video on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp, not a laser. Russell's patent application was filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell's patents for recording, not the play-back part (then held by a Canadian company, Optical Recording Corp.) in the 1980s. It is debatable whether Russell's concepts, patents, and prototypes instigated and in some measure influenced compact disc's design.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a focused laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Unlike the prior art by Optophonie and James Russell, the information on the disc is read from a reflective layer using a laser as a light source through a protective substrate. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s. Although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the "Red Book" CD-DA standard was published in 1980. After their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984. By 1988, CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and by 1992 CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music cassette tapes. The success of the compact disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, which together agreed upon and developed compatible hardware. The unified design of the compact disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company, and allowed the CD to dominate the at-home music market unchallenged.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: In 1974, Lou Ottens, director of the audio division of Philips, started a small group to develop an analog optical audio disc with a diameter of and a sound quality superior to that of the vinyl record. However, due to the unsatisfactory performance of the analog format, two Philips research engineers recommended a digital format in March 1974. In 1977, Philips then established a laboratory with the mission of creating a digital audio disc. The diameter of Philips's prototype compact disc was set at , the diagonal of an audio cassette.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Heitaro Nakajima, who developed an early digital audio recorder within Japan's national public broadcasting organization NHK in 1970, became general manager of Sony's audio department in 1971. His team developed a digital PCM adaptor audio tape recorder using a Betamax video recorder in 1973. After this, in 1974 the leap to storing digital audio on an optical disc was easily made. Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. A year later, in September 1977, Sony showed the press a disc that could play an hour of digital audio (44,100 Hz sampling rate and 16-bit resolution) using MFM modulation. In September 1978, the company demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with a 150-minute playing time, 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, and cross-interleaved error correction code—specifications similar to those later settled upon for the standard compact disc format in 1980. Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on 13–16 March 1979, in Brussels. Sony's AES technical paper was published on 1 March 1979. A week later, on 8 March, Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduce Compact Disc" in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Sony executive Norio Ohga, later CEO and chairman of Sony, and Heitaro Nakajima were convinced of the format's commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by engineers Kees Schouhamer Immink and Toshitada Doi, the research pushed forward laser and optical disc technology. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the task force produced the "Red Book" CD-DA standard. First published in 1980, the standard was formally adopted by the IEC as an international standard in 1987, with various amendments becoming part of the standard in 1996.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Philips coined the term "compact disc" in line with another audio product, the Compact Cassette, and contributed the general manufacturing process, based on video LaserDisc technology. Philips also contributed eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM), while Sony contributed the error-correction method, CIRC, which offers a certain resilience to defects such as scratches and fingerprints.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The "Compact Disc Story", told by a former member of the task force, gives background information on the many technical decisions made, including the choice of the sampling frequency, playing time, and disc diameter. The task force consisted of around 6 persons, though according to Philips, the compact disc was "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team."


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Philips established the Polydor Pressing Operations plant in Langenhagen near Hannover, Germany, and quickly passed a series of milestones.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The Japanese launch was followed on 14 March 1983 by the introduction of CD players and discs to Europe and North America (where CBS Records released sixteen titles). The growing acceptance of the CD in 1983 marks the beginning of the popular digital audio revolution. It was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities, and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players gradually came down, and with the introduction of the portable Discman, the CD began to gain popularity in the larger popular and rock music markets. With the rise in CD sales, pre-recorded cassette tape sales began to decline in the late 1980s; CD sales overtook cassette sales in the early 1990s.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The first artist to sell a million copies on CD was Dire Straits, with their 1985 album "Brothers in Arms". One of the first CD markets was devoted to reissuing popular music whose commercial potential was already proven. The first major artist to have their entire catalog converted to CD was David Bowie, whose first fourteen studio albums of (then) sixteen were made available by RCA Records in February 1985, along with four greatest hits albums; his fifteenth and sixteenth albums had already been issued on CD by EMI Records in 1983 and 1984, respectively. On 26 February 1987, the first four UK albums by the Beatles were released in mono on compact disc. In 1988, 400 million CDs were manufactured by 50 pressing plants around the world.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Early CD players employed binary-weighted digital-to-analog converters (DAC), which contained individual electrical components for each bit of the DAC. Even when using high-precision components, this approach was prone to decoding errors, exacerbated by the "zero-crossing problem". Another issue was jitter, not an amplitude- but a time-related defect. Confronted with the instability of DACs, manufacturers initially turned to increasing the number of bits in the DAC and using several DACs per audio channel, averaging their output. This increased the cost of CD players but did not solve the core problem.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: A breakthrough in the late 1980s culminated in development of "1-bit" DAC, which converts high-resolution low-frequency digital input signal into a lower-resolution high-frequency signal that is mapped to voltages and then smoothed with an analog filter. The temporary use of a lower-resolution signal simplified circuit design and improved efficiency, which is why it became dominant in CD players starting from the early 1990s. Philips used a variation of this technique called pulse-density modulation (PDM), while Matsushita (now Panasonic) chose pulse-width modulation (PWM), advertising it as "MASH", which is an acronym derived from their patented Multi-stAge noiSe-sHaping PWM topology.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The CD was primarily planned as the successor to the vinyl record for playing music, rather than as a data storage medium. However, CDs have grown to encompass other applications. In 1983, following the CD's introduction, Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable compact discs during the 73rd AES Convention. In June 1985, the computer-readable CD-ROM (read-only memory) and, in 1990, CD-Recordable were introduced. Recordable CDs became an alternative to tape for recording and distributing music and could be duplicated without degradation in sound quality. Other newer video formats such as DVD and Blu-ray use the same physical geometry as CD, and most DVD and Blu-ray players are backward compatible with audio CD.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: CD sales in the United States peaked by 2000. By the early 2000s, the CD player had largely replaced the audio cassette player as standard equipment in new automobiles, with 2010 being the final model year for any car in the United States to have a factory-equipped cassette player.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: With the advent and popularity of Internet-based distribution of files in lossy-compressed audio formats such as MP3, sales of CDs began to decline in the 2000s. For example, between 2000 and 2008, despite overall growth in music sales and one anomalous year of increase, major-label CD sales declined overall by 20%, although independent and DIY music sales may be tracking better according to figures released 30 March 2009, and CDs still continue to sell greatly. As of 2012, CDs and DVDs made up only 34% of music sales in the United States. , only 24% of music in the United States was purchased on physical media, 2/3 of this consisting of CDs; however, in the same year in Japan, over 80% of music was bought on CDs and other physical formats. In 2018, U.S. CD sales were 52 million units—less than 6% of the peak sales volume in 2000. In the UK 32 million units were sold, almost 100 million fewer than in 2008.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: During the 2010s, the increasing popularity of solid-state media and music streaming services caused automakers to remove automotive CD players in favor of minijack auxiliary inputs, wired connections to USB devices and wireless Bluetooth connections. Automakers viewed CD players as using up valuable space and taking up weight which could be reallocated to more popular features, like large touchscreens. By 2021, only Lexus and General Motors were still including CD players as standard equipment with certain vehicles.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Despite rapidly declining sales year-over-year, the pervasiveness of the technology lingered for a time, with companies placing CDs in pharmacies, supermarkets, and filling station convenience stores to target buyers less likely to be able to use Internet-based distribution. In 2018 Best Buy announced plans to decrease their focus on CD sales, however, while continuing to sell records, sales of which are growing during the vinyl revival. CDs continued to be strong in some markets such as Japan where 132 million units were produced in 2019.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The decline in CD sales has slowed in recent years, and in 2021 CD sales increased in the US for the first time since 2004, with Axios citing its rise to "young people who are finding they like hard copies of music in the digital age". It came at the same time as both physical vinyl and cassette reaching sales levels not seen in 30 years.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Sony and Philips received praise for the development of the compact disc from professional organizations. These awards include


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The "Red Book" specifies the physical parameters and properties of the CD, the optical parameters, deviations and error rate, modulation system (eight-to-fourteen modulation, EFM) and error correction facility (cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding, CIRC), and the eight subcode channels. These parameters are common to all compact discs and used by all logical formats: audio CD, CD-ROM, etc. The standard also specifies the form of digital audio encoding (2-channel signed 16-bit LPCM sampled at 44,100 Hz).


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The first edition of the "Red Book" was released in 1980 by Philips and Sony; it was adopted by the Digital Audio Disc Committee and ratified by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee 100 as an international standard in 1987 with the reference IEC 60908. The second edition of IEC 60908 was published in 1999 and it replaces the first edition, amendment 1 (1992) and the corrigendum to amendment 1. The IEC 60908 however does not contain all the information for extensions that is available in the Red Book, such as the details for CD-Text, CD+G and CD+EG.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The standard is not freely available and must be licensed. It is available from Philips and the IEC. , Philips outsources licensing of the standard to Adminius, which charges for the "Red Book", plus each for the "Subcode Channels R-W" and "CD Text Mode" annexes.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The audio contained in a CD-DA consists of two-channel signed 16-bit LPCM sampled at 44,100 Hz and written as a little-endian interleaved stream with left channel coming first.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The sampling rate is adapted from that attained when recording digital audio on videotape with a PCM adaptor, an earlier way of storing digital audio. An audio CD can represent frequencies up to 22.05 kHz, the Nyquist frequency of the 44.1 kHz sample rate.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: There was a long debate over the use of 16-bit (Sony) or 14-bit (Philips) quantization, and 44,056 or 44,100 samples/s (Sony) or approximately 44,000 samples/s (Philips). When the Sony/Philips task force designed the Compact Disc, Philips had already developed a 14-bit D/A converter (DAC), but Sony insisted on 16-bit. In the end Sony won, so 16 bits and 44.1 kilosamples per second prevailed. Philips found a way to produce 16-bit quality using its 14-bit DAC by using four times oversampling.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Some CDs are mastered with pre-emphasis, an artificial boost of high audio frequencies. The pre-emphasis improves the apparent signal-to-noise ratio by making better use of the channel's dynamic range. On playback, the player applies a de-emphasis filter to restore the frequency response curve to an overall flat one. Pre-emphasis time constants are 50µs and 15µs (9.49 dB boost at 20 kHz), and a binary flag in the disc subcode instructs the player to apply de-emphasis filtering if appropriate. Playback of such discs in a computer or ripping to WAV files typically does not take into account the pre-emphasis, so such files play back with a distorted frequency response.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The creators of the CD originally aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips). Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate the recording of Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the 1951 Bayreuth Festival. The additional 14-minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Schouhamer Immink, Philips' chief engineer, however, denies this, claiming that the increase was motivated by technical considerations, and that even after the increase in size, the Furtwängler recording would not have fit onto one of the earliest CDs.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: According to a "Sunday Tribune" interview, the story is slightly more involved. In 1979, Philips owned PolyGram, one of the world's largest distributors of music. PolyGram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hannover, Germany, which could produce huge numbers of CDs having a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115-mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. The long playing time of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips' PolyGram lost its edge on disc fabrication.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The 74-minute playing time of a CD, which is longer than the 22 minutes per side typical of long-playing (LP) vinyl albums, was often used to the CD's advantage during the early years when CDs and LPs vied for commercial sales. CDs would often be released with one or more bonus tracks, enticing consumers to buy the CD for the extra material. However, attempts to combine double LPs onto one CD occasionally resulted in the opposite situation in which the CD would instead offer less audio than the LP. One such example was with DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince's double-album "He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper", in which initial CD releases of the album had multiple tracks edited down for length to fit on a single disc; recent CD reissues package the album across two discs as a result. The emergence of 80-minute CDs allowed for some double albums that were previously edited for length or packaged as double-CDs to be re-released on a single disc, such as "1999" by Prince in the case of the former and "Tommy" by the Who in the case of the latter.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Playing times beyond 74 minutes are achieved by decreasing track pitch (the distance separating the track as it spirals the disc). However, most players can still accommodate the more closely spaced data if it is still within "Red Book" tolerances. Current manufacturing processes allow an audio CD to contain up to 80 minutes (variable from one replication plant to another) without requiring the content creator to sign a waiver releasing the plant owner from responsibility if the CD produced is marginally or entirely unreadable by some playback equipment. In current practice, maximum CD playing time has crept higher by reducing minimum engineering tolerances.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Each audio sample is a signed 16-bit two's complement integer, with sample values ranging from −32768 to +32767. The source audio data is divided into frames, containing twelve samples each (six left and six right samples, alternating), for a total of 192 bits (24 bytes) of audio data per frame.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: This stream of audio frames, as a whole, is then subjected to CIRC encoding, which segments and rearranges the data and expands it with error correction codes in a way that allows occasional read errors to be detected and corrected. CIRC encoding interleaves the audio frames throughout the disc over several consecutive frames so that the information will be more resistant to burst errors. Therefore, a physical frame on the disc will actually contain information from multiple logical audio frames. This process adds 64 bits of error correction data to each frame. After this, 8 bits of subcode or subchannel data are added to each of these encoded frames, which is used for control and addressing when playing the CD.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: CIRC encoding plus the subcode byte generate 33-bytes long frames, called "channel-data" frames. These frames are then modulated through eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM), where each 8-bit word is replaced with a corresponding 14-bit word designed to reduce the number of transitions between 0 and 1. This reduces the density of physical pits on the disc and provides an additional degree of error tolerance. Three "merging" bits are added before each 14-bit word for disambiguation and synchronization. In total there are 33 × (14 + 3) = 561 bits. A 27-bit word (a 24-bit pattern plus 3 merging bits) is added to the beginning of each frame to assist with synchronization, so the reading device can locate frames easily. With this, a frame ends up containing 588 bits of "channel data" (which are decoded to only 192 bits of music).


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The frames of channel data are finally written to disc physically in the form of pits and lands, with each pit or land representing a series of zeroes, and with the transition points—the edge of each pit—representing a 1.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: A Red Book-compatible CD-R has pit-and-land-shaped spots on a layer of organic dye instead of actual pits and lands; a laser creates the spots by altering the reflective properties of the dye.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Due to the weaker error correction sector structure used on audio CDs and video CDs ("Mode 2 Form 2") than on data discs ("Mode 1" or "Mode 2 Form 1"), C2 errors are not correctable and signify data loss. Even with uncorrectable errors, a compact disc player interpolates the data loss with the aim of making the damage unhearable.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The audio data stream in an audio CD is continuous, but has three parts. The main portion, which is further divided into playable audio tracks, is the "program area". This section is preceded by a "lead-in" track and followed by a "lead-out" track. The lead-in and lead-out tracks encode only silent audio, but all three sections contain subcode data streams.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The lead-in's subcode contains repeated copies of the disc's Table of Contents (TOC), which provides an index of the start positions of the tracks in the program area and lead-out. The track positions are referenced by absolute timecode, relative to the start of the program area, in MSF format: minutes, seconds, and fractional seconds called "frames". Each timecode frame is one seventy-fifth of a second, and corresponds to a block of 98 channel-data frames—ultimately, a block of 588 pairs of left and right audio samples. Timecode contained in the subchannel data allows the reading device to locate the region of the disc that corresponds to the timecode in the TOC. The TOC on discs is analogous to the partition table on hard drives. Nonstandard or corrupted TOC records are abused as a form of CD/DVD copy protection, in e.g. the key2Audio scheme.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The largest entity on a CD is called a track. A CD can contain up to 99 tracks (including a data track for mixed mode discs). Each track can in turn have up to 100 indexes, though players which still support this feature have become rarer over time. The vast majority of songs are recorded under index 1, with the pre-gap being index 0. Sometimes hidden tracks are placed at the end of the last track of the disc, often using index 2 or 3, or using the pre-gap as index 0 (this latter usage will result in the track playing as the time counter counts down to time 0:00 at the start of the track, index 1.) This is also the case with some discs offering "101 sound effects", with 100 and 101 being indexed as two and three on track 99. The index, if used, is occasionally put on the track listing as a decimal part of the track number, such as 99.2 or 99.3. (Information Society's "Hack" was one of very few CD releases to do this, following a release with an equally obscure CD+G feature.) The track and index structure of the CD were carried forward to the DVD format as title and chapter, respectively.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Tracks, in turn, are divided into timecode frames (or sectors), which are further subdivided into channel-data frames.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The smallest entity in a CD is a channel-data "frame", which consists of 33 bytes and contains six complete 16-bit stereo samples: 24 bytes for the audio (two bytes × two channels × six samples = 24 bytes), eight CIRC error-correction bytes, and one subcode byte. As described in the "Data encoding" section, after the EFM modulation the number of bits in a frame totals 588.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: On a "Red Book" audio CD, data is addressed using the "MSF scheme", with timecodes expressed in minutes, seconds and another type of "frames" (mm:ss:ff), where one frame corresponds to 1/75 of a second of audio: 588 pairs of left and right samples. This timecode frame is distinct from the 33-byte channel-data frame described above, and is used for time display and positioning the reading laser. When editing and extracting CD audio, this timecode frame is the smallest addressable time interval for an audio CD; thus, track boundaries only occur on these frame boundaries. Each of these structures contains 98 channel-data frames, totaling 98 × 24 = 2,352 bytes of music. The CD is played at a speed of 75 frames (or sectors) per second, thus 44,100 samples or 176,400 bytes per second.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: In the 1990s, CD-ROM and related Digital Audio Extraction (DAE) technology introduced the term "sector" to refer to each timecode frame, with each sector being identified by a sequential integer number starting at zero, and with tracks aligned on sector boundaries. An audio CD sector corresponds to 2,352 bytes of decoded data. The "Red Book" does not refer to sectors, nor does it distinguish the corresponding sections of the disc's data stream except as "frames" in the MSF addressing scheme.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The following table shows the relation between tracks, timecode frames (sectors) and channel-data frames:


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: The audio bit rate for a "Red Book" audio CD is 1,411,200 bits per second (1,411 kbit/s) or 176,400 bytes per second; 2 channels × 44,100 samples per second per channel × 16 bits per sample. Audio data coming in from a CD is contained in sectors, each sector being 2,352 bytes, and with 75 sectors containing 1 second of audio. For comparison, the bit rate of a "1×" CD-ROM is defined as 2,048 bytes per sector × 75 sectors per second = 153,600 bytes per second. The remaining 304 bytes in a sector are used for additional data error correction.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Unlike on a DVD or CD-ROM, there are no "files" on a "Red Book" audio CD; there is only one continuous stream of LPCM audio data, and a parallel, smaller set of 8 subcode data streams. Computer operating systems, however, may provide access to an audio CD as if it contains files. For example, Windows represents the CD's Table of Contents as a set of Compact Disc Audio track (CDA) files, each file containing indexing information, not audio data. By contrast however, Finder on macOS presents the CD's content as an actual set of files, with the AIFF-extension, which can be copied directly, randomly and individually by track as if it were actual files. In reality, macOS performs its own as-needed-rips in the background completely transparent to the user. The copied tracks are fully playable and editable on the user's computer.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: In a process called ripping, digital audio extraction software can be used to read CD-DA audio data and store it in files. Common audio file formats for this purpose include WAV and AIFF, which simply preface the LPCM data with a short header; FLAC, ALAC, and Windows Media Audio Lossless, which compress the LPCM data in ways that conserve space yet allow it to be restored without any changes; and various lossy, perceptual coding formats like MP3, AAC, and Opus, which modify and compress the audio data in ways that irreversibly change the audio, but that exploit features of human hearing to make the changes difficult to discern.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Recording publishers have created CDs that violate the "Red Book" standard. Some do so for the purpose of copy prevention, using systems like Copy Control. Some do so for extra features such as DualDisc, which includes both a CD layer and a DVD layer whereby the CD layer is much thinner, 0.9 mm, than required by the "Red Book", which stipulates a nominal 1.2 mm, but at least 1.1 mm. Philips and many other companies have stated that including the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo on such non-conforming discs may constitute trademark infringement.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: Super Audio CD was a standard published in 1999 that aimed to provide better audio quality in CDs. DVD Audio emerged at around the same time. The format was designed to feature audio of higher fidelity. It applies a higher sampling rate and uses 650 nm lasers. Neither format was widely accepted.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: There have been moves by the recording industry to make audio CDs (Compact Disc Digital Audio) unplayable on computer CD-ROM drives, to prevent the copying of music. This is done by intentionally introducing errors onto the disc that the embedded circuits on most stand-alone audio players can automatically compensate for, but which may confuse CD-ROM drives. Consumer rights advocates as of October 2001 pushed to require warning labels on compact discs that do not conform to the official Compact Disc Digital Audio standard (often called the Red Book) to inform consumers which discs do not permit full fair use of their content.


title: Compact Disc Digital Audio

text: In 2005, Sony BMG Music Entertainment was criticized when a copy protection mechanism known as Extended Copy Protection (XCP) used on some of their audio CDs automatically and surreptitiously installed copy-prevention software on computers (see Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal). Such discs are not legally allowed to be called CDs or Compact Discs because they break the Red Book standard governing CDs, and Amazon.com for example describes them as "copy protected discs" rather than "compact discs" or "CDs".


title: Almanac

text: An almanac (also spelled "almanack" and "almanach") is an annual publication listing a set of current information about one or multiple subjects. It includes information like weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, tide tables, and other tabular data often arranged according to the calendar. Celestial figures and various statistics are found in almanacs, such as the rising and setting times of the Sun and Moon, dates of eclipses, hours of high and low tides, and religious festivals. The set of events noted in an almanac may be tailored for a specific group of readers, such as farmers, sailors, or astronomers.


title: Almanac

text: The etymology of the word is disputed. The earliest documented use of the word in any language is in Latin in 1267 by Roger Bacon, where it meant a set of tables detailing movements of heavenly bodies including the Moon.


title: Almanac

text: It has been suggested that the word "almanac" derives from a Greek word meaning "calendar". However, that word appears only once in antiquity, by Eusebius who quotes Porphyry as to the Coptic Egyptian use of astrological charts ("almenichiaká"). The earliest almanacs were calendars that included agricultural, astronomical, or meteorological data. But it is highly unlikely Roger Bacon received the word from this etymology: "Notwithstanding the suggestive sound and use of this word (of which however the real form is very uncertain), the difficulties of connecting it historically either with the Spanish Arabic manākh, or with Medieval Latin almanach without Arabic intermediation, seem insurmountable."


title: Almanac

text: One etymology report says "The ultimate source of the word is obscure. Its first syllable, al-, and its general relevance to medieval science and technology, strongly suggest an Arabic origin, but no convincing candidate has been found". Ernest Weekley similarly states of "almanac": "First seen in Roger Bacon. Apparently from Spanish Arabic, "al-manakh", but this is not an Arabic word...The word remains a puzzle." Walter William Skeat concludes that the construction of an Arabic origin is "not satisfactory". The "Oxford English Dictionary" similarly says "the word has no etymon in Arabic" but indirect circumstantial evidence "points to a Spanish Arabic "al-manākh"".


title: Almanac

text: The reason why the proposed Arabic word is speculatively spelled "al-manākh" is that the spelling occurred as "almanach", as well as almanac (and Roger Bacon used both spellings). The earliest use of the word was in the context of astronomy calendars. The Arabic word المناخ "al-munākh" has different meanings in contemporary Arabic than in classical Arabic usage. The word originally meant "the place where camels kneel [so riders and baggage can disembark]". In contemporary Arabic, the word means "climate".


title: Almanac

text: The prestige of the Tables of Toledo and other medieval Arabic astronomy works at the time of the word's emergence in the West, together with the absence of the word in Arabic, suggest it may have been invented in the West and is pseudo-Arabic. At that time in the West, it would have been prestigious to attach an Arabic appellation to a set of astronomical tables. Also around that time, prompted by that motive, the Latin writer Pseudo-Geber wrote under an Arabic pseudonym. (The later alchemical word "alkahest" is known to be pseudo-Arabic.)


title: Almanac

text: The earlier texts considered to be almanacs have been found in the Near East, dating back to the middle of the second millennium BC. They have been called generally hemerologies, from the Greek "hēmerā", meaning "day". Among them is the so-called Babylonian Almanac, which lists favorable and unfavorable days with advice on what to do on each of them. Successive variants and versions aimed at different readership have been found. Egyptian lists of good and bad moments, three times each day, have also been found. Many of these prognostics were connected with celestial events. The flooding of the Nile valley, a most important event in ancient Egypt, was expected to occur at the summer solstice, but as the civil calendar had exactly 365 days, over the centuries, the date was drifting in the calendar. The first heliacal rising of Sirius was used for its prediction and this practice, the observation of some star and its connecting to some event apparently spread.


title: Almanac

text: The Greek almanac, known as parapegma, has existed in the form of an inscribed stone on which the days of the month were indicated by movable pegs inserted into bored holes, hence the name. There were also written texts and according to Diogenes Laërtius, "Parapegma" was the title of a book by Democritus. Ptolemy, the Alexandrian astronomer (2nd century) wrote a treatise, "Phaseis"—"phases of fixed stars and collection of weather-changes" is the translation of its full title—the core of which is a "parapegma", a list of dates of seasonally regular weather changes, first appearances and last appearances of stars or constellations at sunrise or sunset, and solar events such as solstices, all organized according to the solar year. With the astronomical computations were expected weather phenomena, composed as a digest of observations made by various authorities of the past. "Parapegmata" had been composed for centuries.


title: Almanac

text: Ptolemy believed that astronomical phenomena caused the changes in seasonal weather; his explanation of why there was not an exact correlation of these events was that the physical influences of other heavenly bodies also came into play. Hence for him, weather prediction was a special division of astrology.


title: Almanac

text: The origins of the almanac can be connected to ancient Babylonian astronomy, when tables of planetary periods were produced in order to predict lunar and planetary phenomena. Similar treatises called Zij were later composed in medieval Islamic astronomy.


title: Almanac

text: The modern almanac differs from Babylonian, Ptolemaic and Zij tables in the sense that "the entries found in the almanacs give directly the positions of the celestial bodies and need no further computation", in contrast to the more common "auxiliary astronomical tables" based on Ptolemy's "Almagest". The earliest known almanac in this modern sense is the "Almanac of Azarqueil" written in 1088 by Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī (Latinized as Arzachel) in Toledo, al-Andalus. The work provided the true daily positions of the sun, moon and planets for four years from 1088 to 1092, as well as many other related tables. A Latin translation and adaptation of the work appeared as the "Tables of Toledo" in the 12th century and the "Alfonsine tables" in the 13th century.


title: Almanac

text: After almanacs were devised, people still saw little difference between predicting the movements of the stars and tides, and predicting the future in the divination sense. Early almanacs therefore contained general horoscopes, as well as natural information. In 1150 Solomon Jarchus created such an almanac considered to be among the first modern examples. Copies of 12th century almanacs are found in the British Museum, and in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1300, Petrus de Dacia created an almanac (Savilian Library, Oxford) the same year Roger Bacon, OFM, produced his own. In 1327 Walter de Elvendene created an almanac and later on John Somers of Oxford, in 1380. In 1386 Nicholas de Lynne, Oxford produced an almanac. In 1457 the first printed almanac was published at Mainz, by Gutenberg (eight years before the famous Bible). Regio-Montanus produced an almanac in 1472 (Nuremberg, 1472), which continued in print for several centuries. In 1497 the "Sheapheard’s Kalendar", translated from French (Richard Pynson) became the first almanac to be printed in English.


title: Almanac

text: By the second half of the 16th century, yearly almanacs were being produced in England by authors such as Anthony Askham, Thomas Buckminster, John Dade and Gabriel Frende. In the 17th century, English almanacs were bestsellers, second only to the Bible; by the middle of the century, 400,000 almanacs were being produced annually (a complete listing can be found in the English Short Title Catalogue). Until its deregulation in 1775, the Stationers' Company maintained a lucrative monopoly over almanac publication in England. Richard Allestree (not to be confused with Richard Allestree (1621/22–1681), provost of Eton College) wrote one of the more popular English almanacs, producing yearly volumes from 1617 to 1643, but his is by no means the earliest or the longest-running almanac.


title: Almanac

text: Works that satirized this type of publication appeared in the late 1500s. During the next century, a writer using the pseudonym of "Poor Richard, Knight of the Burnt Island" began to publish a series of such parodies that were entitled "Poor Robin's Almanack". The 1664 issue of the series stated: "This month we may expect to hear of the Death of some Man, Woman, or Child, either in Kent or Christendom."


title: Almanac

text: The first almanac printed in the Thirteen Colonies of British America was William Pierce's 1639 "An Almanac Calculated for New England". The almanac was the first in a series of such publications that Stephen Daye, or Day, printed each year until 1649 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Cambridge/Boston area in Massachusetts soon became the first center in the colonies for the annual publication of almanacs, to be followed by Philadelphia during the first half of the eighteenth century.


title: Almanac

text: Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, Massachusetts, issued his popular "Astronomical Diary and Almanack" in 1725 and annually after c.1732. James Franklin published "The Rhode Island Almanack" by "Poor Robin" for each year from 1728 to 1735. James' brother, Benjamin Franklin, published his annual "Poor Richard's Almanack" in Philadelphia from 1732 to 1758.


title: Almanac

text: Samuel Stearns of Paxton, Massachusetts, issued the "North-American Almanack", published annually from 1771 to 1784, as well as the first American nautical almanac, "The Navigator's Kalendar, or Nautical Almanack, for 1783". Andrew Ellicott of Ellicott's Upper Mills, Maryland, authored a series of almanacs, "The United States Almanack", the earliest known copy of which bears the date of 1782. Benjamin Banneker, a free African American living near Ellicott's Mills, composed a series of almanacs for the years of 1792 to 1797.