Summary.

The word "robot" can refer to both physical robots and virtual software agents, but the latter are usually referred to as bots. There is no consensus on which machines qualify as robots but there is general agreement among experts, and the public, that robots tend to possess some or all

History.

The idea of automata originates in the mythologies of many cultures around the world. Engineers and inventors from ancient civilizations, including Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Ptolemaic Egypt, attempted to build self-operating machines, some resembling animals and humans. Early descriptions of automata include the artificial doves of Archytas, the artificial birds of Mozi and Lu Ban, a "speaking" automaton by Hero of Alexandria, a washstand automaton by Philo of Byzantium, and a human automaton described in the "Lie Zi".

Early beginnings.

Many ancient mythologies, and most modern religions include artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans), the clay golems of Jewish legend and clay giants of Norse legend, and Galatea, the mythical statue of Pygmalion that came to life. Since circa 400 BC, myths of Crete include Talos, a man of bronze who guarded the island from pirates.  In ancient Greece, the Greek engineer Ctesibius (c. 270 BC) "applied a knowledge of pneumatics and hydraulics to produce the first organ and water clocks with moving figures." In the 4th century BC, the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum postulated a mechanical steam-operated bird he called "The Pigeon". Hero of Alexandria, a Greek mathematician

Remote-controlled systems.

Remotely operated vehicles were demonstrated in the late 19th century in the form of several types of remotely controlled torpedoes. The early 1870s saw remotely controlled torpedoes by John Ericsson (pneumatic), John Louis Lay (electric wire guided), and Victor von Scheliha (electric wire guided).  The Brennan torpedo, invented by Louis Brennan in 1877, was powered by two contra-rotating propellors that were spun by rapidly pulling out wires from drums wound inside the torpedo. Differential

Origin of the term 'robot'.

'Robot' was first applied as a term for artificial automata in the 1920 play "R.U.R." by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek. However, Josef Čapek was named by his brother Karel as the true inventor of the term robot. The word 'robot' itself was not new, having been in the Slavic language as "robota" (forced laborer), a term which classified those peasants obligated to compulsory service under the feudal system (see:

Early robots.

In 1928, one of the first humanoid robots, Eric, was exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Model Engineers Society in London, where it delivered a speech. Invented by W. H. Richards, the robot's frame consisted of an aluminium body of armour with eleven electromagnets and one motor powered by a twelve-volt power source. The robot could move its hands and head and could be controlled through remote control or voice control. Both Eric and his

Modern autonomous robots.

The first electronic autonomous robots with complex behaviour were created by William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, England in 1948 and 1949. He wanted to prove that rich connections between a small number of brain cells could give rise to very complex behaviors – essentially that the secret of how the brain worked lay in how it was wired up. His first robots, named "Elmer" and "Elsie", were constructed between 1948 and 1949 and were often described as "tortoises" due to their shape and slow rate of movement. The three-wheeled tortoise robots were capable of phototaxis, by which they could find their way to a recharging station when they ran low on battery power.  Walter stressed the importance of using purely analogue electronics to simulate brain processes at a time when his contemporaries such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann were all turning towards a view of mental processes in terms

Future development and trends.

Various techniques have emerged to develop the science of robotics and robots. One method is evolutionary robotics, in which a number of differing robots are submitted to tests. Those which perform best are used as a model to create a subsequent "generation" of robots. Another method is developmental robotics, which tracks changes and development within a single robot in the areas of problem-solving and other functions. Another new type of robot is just recently introduced which acts both as a smartphone and robot and is named RoboHon.  As robots become more advanced, eventually there may be a standard computer operating system designed mainly for robots. Robot Operating System is an open-source set of programs being developed at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, among others. ROS provides ways to program a robot's navigation and limbs regardless of the specific hardware involved. It also provides high-level commands for items like image recognition and even opening doors. When ROS boots up on a robot's computer, it would obtain data on attributes such as the length and movement of robots' limbs. It would relay this data to higher-level algorithms. Microsoft is also developing a "Windows for robots" system with its Robotics Developer Studio, which has been available since 2007.  Japan hopes to have full-scale commercialization of service robots by 2025. Much technological research in Japan is led by Japanese government agencies, particularly the Trade Ministry.  Many future applications of robotics seem obvious to people, even though they are well beyond the capabilities of robots available at the time of the prediction. As early as 1982 people were confident that someday robots would: 1. Clean parts by removing molding flash 2. Spray paint automobiles with absolutely no human presence 3. Pack things in boxes—for example, orient and nest chocolate candies in candy boxes 4. Make electrical cable harness 5. Load trucks with boxes—a packing problem 6. Handle soft goods, such as garments and shoes 7. Shear sheep 8. prosthesis 9. Cook fast food and work in other service industries 10. Household robot.  Generally such predictions are overly optimistic in timescale.

New functionalities and prototypes.

In 2008, Caterpillar Inc. developed a dump truck which can drive itself without any human operator. Many analysts believe that self-driving trucks may eventually revolutionize logistics. By 2014, Caterpillar had a self-driving dump truck which is expected to greatly change the process of mining. In 2015, these Caterpillar trucks were actively used in mining operations in Australia by the mining company Rio Tinto Coal Australia. Some analysts believe that within the next few decades, most trucks will be self-driving.  A literate or'reading robot' named Marge has intelligence that comes from software. She can

Etymology.

The word "robot" was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)", published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called "robots." The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and incite robots all around the world to rise up against the humans).  Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the "Oxford English Dictionary" in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.  In an article in the Czech journal

Modern robots.

Mobile robot.

Mobile robots have the capability to move around in their environment and are not fixed to one physical location. An example of a mobile robot that is in common use today is the "automated guided vehicle" or "automatic guided vehicle" (AGV). An AGV is a mobile robot that follows markers or wires in the floor, or uses vision or lasers. AGVs are discussed later in this article.  Mobile robots are also

Industrial robots (manipulating).

Industrial robots usually consist of a jointed arm (multi-linked manipulator) and an end effector that is attached to a fixed surface. One of the most common type of end effector is a gripper assembly.  The International Organization for Standardization

Service robot.

Most commonly industrial robots are fixed robotic arms and manipulators used primarily for production and distribution of goods. The term "service robot" is less

Educational (interactive) robots.

Robots are used as educational assistants to teachers. From the 1980s, robots such as turtles were used in schools and programmed using the Logo language.  There are robot kits like Lego Mindstorms, BIOLOID, OLLO from ROBOTIS, or BotBrain Educational Robots can help children to learn about mathematics, physics, programming, and electronics. Robotics have also been introduced into the lives of elementary and high school students in the form

Modular robot.

Modular robots are a new breed of robots that are designed to increase the utilization of robots by modularizing their architecture. The functionality and effectiveness of a modular robot is easier to increase compared to conventional robots. These robots are composed of a single type of identical, several different identical module types, or similarly shaped modules, which vary in size. Their architectural structure allows hyper-redundancy for modular robots, as they can be designed with more than 8 degrees of freedom (DOF). Creating the programming, inverse kinematics and dynamics for modular robots is more complex than with traditional robots. Modular robots may be composed of L-shaped modules, cubic modules, and U and H-shaped modules. ANAT technology, an early modular robotic technology patented by Robotics Design Inc., allows the creation of modular robots from U and H shaped modules that connect in a chain, and are used to form heterogeneous and homogenous modular robot systems. These "ANAT robots" can be designed with "n" DOF as each module is a complete motorized robotic system

Collaborative robots.

A "collaborative robot" or "cobot" is a robot that can safely and effectively interact with human workers while performing simple industrial tasks. However, end-effectors and other environmental conditions may create hazards, and as such risk assessments should be done before using any industrial motion-control application.  The collaborative robots most widely used in industries today are manufactured by Universal

Robots in society.

Roughly half of all the robots in the world are in Asia, 32% in Europe, and 16% in North America, 1% in Australasia and 1% in Africa. 40% of all the robots in the world are in Japan, making Japan the country with the highest number of robots.

Autonomy and ethical questions.

As robots have become more advanced and sophisticated, experts and academics have increasingly explored the questions of what ethics might govern robots' behavior, and whether robots might be able to claim any kind of social, cultural, ethical or legal rights. One scientific team has said that it is possible that a robot brain will exist by 2019. Others predict robot intelligence breakthroughs by 2050. Recent advances have made robotic behavior more sophisticated. The social impact of intelligent robots is subject of a 2010 documentary film called "Plug & Pray".  Vernor Vinge has suggested that a moment may come when computers and robots are smarter than humans. He calls this "the Singularity". He suggests that it may be somewhat or possibly very dangerous for humans. This is discussed by

Military robots.

Some experts and academics have questioned the use of robots for military combat, especially when such robots are given some degree of autonomous functions. There are also concerns about technology which might allow some armed robots to be controlled mainly by other robots. The US Navy has funded a report which indicates that, as military robots become more complex, there should be greater attention to implications of their ability to make autonomous decisions. One researcher states that autonomous robots might be more

Relationship to unemployment.

For centuries, people have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete and increase unemployment, although the causes of unemployment are usually thought to be due to social policy.  A recent example of human replacement involves Taiwanese technology company Foxconn who, in July 2011, announced a three-year plan to replace workers with more robots. At present the company uses ten thousand robots but will increase them to a million robots over a

Contemporary uses.

At present, there are two main types of robots, based on their use: general-purpose autonomous robots and dedicated robots.  Robots can be classified by their specificity of purpose. A robot might be designed to perform one particular task extremely well, or a range of tasks less well. All robots by their nature can be re-programmed to behave differently, but some are limited by their physical form. For example, a factory robot arm can perform jobs such as cutting, welding, gluing, or acting as a fairground ride, while a pick-and-place robot can only populate printed circuit boards.

General-purpose autonomous robots.

General-purpose autonomous robots can perform a variety of functions independently. General-purpose autonomous robots typically can navigate independently in known spaces, handle their own re-charging needs, interface with electronic doors and elevators and perform other basic tasks. Like computers, general-purpose robots can link with networks, software and accessories that increase their usefulness. They may recognize people or objects, talk, provide companionship, monitor environmental quality, respond to

Factory robots.

Car production.

Over the last three decades, automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A typical factory contains hundreds of industrial robots working on fully

Packaging.

Industrial robots are also used extensively for palletizing and packaging of manufactured goods, for example for

Electronics.

Mass-produced printed circuit boards (PCBs) are almost exclusively manufactured by pick-and-place robots, typically with SCARA manipulators, which remove tiny electronic components from

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs).

Mobile robots, following markers or wires in the floor, or using vision or lasers, are used to transport goods around large facilities, such as warehouses, container ports, or hospitals.

Dirty, dangerous, dull or inaccessible tasks.

There are many jobs which humans would rather leave to robots. The job may be boring, such as domestic cleaning or sports field line marking, or dangerous, such as exploring inside a volcano. Other jobs are physically inaccessible, such as exploring another planet, cleaning the inside of a long pipe, or performing laparoscopic surgery.

Space probes.

Almost every unmanned space probe ever launched was a robot. Some were launched in the 1960s with very limited abilities, but

Telerobots.

Teleoperated robots, or telerobots, are devices remotely operated from a distance by a human operator rather than following a predetermined sequence of movements, but which has semi-autonomous behaviour. They are used when a human cannot be present on site to perform a job because it is dangerous, far away, or inaccessible. The robot may be in another room or another country, or may be on a very different scale to the operator. For instance, a laparoscopic surgery robot allows the surgeon to work inside a

Automated fruit harvesting machines.

Robots are used to automate picking fruit

Domestic robots.

Domestic robots are simple robots dedicated to a single task work in home use. They are used in simple but often disliked jobs, such as vacuum cleaning, floor washing, and lawn mowing. An example of a domestic robot is a Roomba.

Military robots.

Military robots include the SWORDS robot which is currently used in ground-based combat. It can use a variety of weapons and there is some discussion of giving it some degree of autonomy in battleground situations.  Unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), which are an upgraded form of UAVs, can do a wide variety of missions, including combat. UCAVs are being designed such as the BAE Systems Mantis which would have the ability to fly themselves, to pick their own course and target, and to make most decisions on their own. The BAE Taranis is a UCAV built by Great Britain which can fly across continents without a pilot and

Mining robots.

Mining robots are designed to solve a number of problems currently facing the mining industry, including skills shortages, improving productivity from declining ore grades, and achieving environmental targets. Due to the hazardous nature of mining, in particular underground mining, the prevalence of autonomous, semi-autonomous, and tele-operated robots has greatly increased in recent times. A number of vehicle manufacturers provide autonomous trains, trucks and loaders that will load material, transport it on the mine site to its destination, and unload without requiring human intervention. One

Healthcare.

Robots in healthcare have two main functions. Those which assist an individual, such as a sufferer of a disease like Multiple Sclerosis, and those which aid in the overall systems such as pharmacies and hospitals.

Home automation for the elderly and disabled.

Robots used in home automation have developed over time from simple basic robotic assistants, such as the Handy 1, through to semi-autonomous robots, such as FRIEND which can assist the elderly and disabled with common tasks.  The population is aging in many countries, especially Japan, meaning that there are increasing numbers of elderly people

Pharmacies.

Script Pro manufactures a robot designed to help pharmacies fill prescriptions that consist of oral solids or medications in pill form. The pharmacist or pharmacy technician enters the prescription information into its information system. The system, upon determining whether or not the drug is in the robot, will send the information to the robot for filling. The robot has 3 different size vials to fill determined by the size of the pill. The robot technician, user, or pharmacist determines the needed size of the vial based on the tablet when the robot is stocked. Once the vial is filled it is brought up to a conveyor belt that delivers it to a holder that spins the vial and attaches the patient label. Afterwards it is set on another conveyor that delivers the patient's medication vial to a slot labeled with the patient's name on

Research robots.

While most robots today are installed in factories or homes, performing labour or life saving jobs, many new types of robot are being developed in laboratories around the world. Much of the research in robotics focuses not on specific industrial tasks, but on investigations into new types of robot, alternative ways to think about or design robots, and new ways to manufacture them. It is expected that these new types of robot will be able to solve real world problems when they are finally realized.

Bionic and biomimetic robots.

One approach to designing robots is to base them on animals. BionicKangaroo

Nanorobots.

Nanorobotics is the emerging technology field of creating machines or robots whose components are at or close to the microscopic scale of a nanometer (10 meters). Also known as "nanobots" or "nanites", they would be constructed from molecular machines. So far, researchers have mostly produced only parts of these complex systems, such as bearings, sensors, and synthetic molecular

Reconfigurable robots.

A few researchers have investigated the possibility of creating robots which can alter their physical form to suit a particular task, like the fictional T-1000.

Soft-bodied robots.

Robots with silicone bodies and flexible actuators (air muscles, electroactive polymers, and ferrofluids) look and feel different from robots with rigid skeletons, and can have different behaviors. Soft,

Swarm robots.

Inspired by colonies of insects such as ants and bees, researchers are modeling the behavior of swarms of thousands of tiny robots which together perform a useful task, such as finding something hidden, cleaning, or spying. Each robot is quite simple, but the emergent behavior of the swarm is more complex. The whole set of robots can be considered

Haptic interface robots.

Robotics also has application in the design of virtual reality interfaces. Specialized robots are in widespread use in the haptic research community. These robots, called "haptic interfaces", allow touch-enabled user interaction with real and virtual environments. Robotic forces allow simulating the mechanical properties of "virtual" objects, which users can experience through their sense of touch.

Contemporary art and sculpture.

Robots are used by contemporary artists to create works that include mechanical automation. There are many branches of robotic art, one of which is robotic installation art, a type of installation art that is programmed to respond to viewer interactions, by

Robots in popular culture.

Literature.

Robotic characters, androids (artificial men/women) or gynoids (artificial women), and cyborgs (also "bionic men/women", or humans with significant mechanical enhancements) have become a staple of science fiction.  The first reference in Western literature to mechanical servants appears in Homer's "Iliad". In Book XVIII, Hephaestus, god of fire, creates new armor for the hero Achilles, assisted by robots. According to the Rieu translation, "Golden maidservants hastened to help their master. They looked like real women and could not only speak and use their limbs but were endowed with intelligence and trained in handwork by the immortal gods." The words "robot" or "android" are not used to describe them, but they are nevertheless mechanical devices human in appearance. "The first use of the word Robot was in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (written in 1920)". Writer Karel Čapek was born in Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic).  Possibly the most prolific author of the twentieth century was Isaac

Films.

Robots appear in many films. Most of the robots in cinema

Sex robots.

The concept of humanoid sex robots has elicited both public attention and concern. Opponents of the concept have stated

Problems depicted in popular culture.

Fears and concerns about robots have been repeatedly expressed in a wide range of books and films. A common theme is the development of a master race of conscious and highly intelligent robots, motivated to take over or destroy the human race. "Frankenstein" (1818), often called the first science fiction novel, has become synonymous with the theme of a robot or android advancing beyond its creator.  Other works with similar themes include "The Mechanical Man", "The Terminator, Runaway, RoboCop", the Replicators in "Stargate", the Cylons in "Battlestar Galactica", the Cybermen and Daleks in

A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer— capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. Robots can be guided by an external control device or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be constructed on the lines of human form, but most robots are machines designed to perform a task with no regard to their aesthetics.

Un robot est un dispositif mécatronique (alliant mécanique, électronique et informatique) conçu pour accomplir automatiquement des tâches imitant ou reproduisant, dans un domaine précis, des actions humaines. La conception de ces systèmes est l'objet d'une discipline scientifique, branche de l'automatisme nommé robotique.


Biography.

Early years.

Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820 in Barmen, Rhine Province, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany) as eldest son of Friedrich Engels Sr. (1796–1860) and of Elisabeth "Elise" Franziska Mauritia von Haar (1797–1873). The wealthy Engels family owned large cotton-textile mills in Barmen and Salford, both expanding industrial metropoles. Friedrich's parents were devout Pietist Protestants and they raised their children accordingly.  At the age of 13, Engels attended grammar school ("Gymnasium") in the adjacent city of Elberfeld but had to leave at 17, due to pressure from his father, who wanted him to become a businessman and start work as a mercantile apprentice in the family firm. After a year in Barmen, the young Engels was in 1838 sent by his father to undertake an apprenticeship at a trading house in Bremen. His parents expected that he would follow his father into a career in the family business. Their

Manchester and Salford.

In 1842, his parents sent the 22-year-old Engels to Manchester, England, a manufacturing centre where industrialisation was on the rise. He was to work in Weaste, Salford in the offices of Ermen and Engels's Victoria Mill, which made sewing threads. Engels's father thought that working at the Manchester firm might make his son reconsider some of his radical opinions. On his way to Manchester, Engels visited the office of the "Rheinische Zeitung" in Cologne and met Karl Marx for the first time. They were not impressed with each other. Marx mistakenly thought that Engels was still associated with the Berliner Young Hegelians, with whom Marx had just broken off ties.  In Manchester, Engels met Mary Burns, a fierce young Irish woman with radical opinions who worked in the Engels factory. They began a relationship that lasted 20 years until her death in 1863. The two never married, as both were against the institution of marriage. While Engels regarded stable monogamy as a virtue, he considered the current state and church-regulated marriage as a form of class oppression. Burns guided Engels through Manchester and Salford, showing

Paris.

Engels decided to return to Germany in 1844. On the way, he stopped in Paris to meet Karl Marx, with whom he had an earlier correspondence. Marx had been living in Paris since late October 1843, after the "Rheinische Zeitung" was banned in March 1843 by Prussian governmental authorities. Prior to meeting Marx, Engels had become established as a fully developed materialist and scientific socialist, independent of Marx's philosophical development.  In Paris, Marx was publishing the "Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher." Engels met

Brussels.

The nation of Belgium, founded in 1830, was endowed with one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe and functioned as refuge for progressives from other countries. From 1845 to 1848, Engels and Marx lived in Brussels, spending much of their time organising the city's German workers. Shortly after their arrival, they contacted and joined the underground German Communist League. The Communist League was the successor organisation to the old League of the Just which had been founded in 1837, but had recently disbanded. Influenced by Wilhelm Weitling, the Communist League was an international society of proletarian revolutionaries with branches in various European cities. The Communist League also had contacts with the underground conspiratorial organisation of Louis Auguste Blanqui. Many of Marx's and Engels's current friends became members of the Communist League. Old friends like Georg Friedrich Herwegh, who had worked with Marx on the "Rheinsche Zeitung", Heinrich Heine, the famous poet, a young doctor by the name of Roland Daniels, Heinrich Bürgers and August Herman Ewerbeck all maintained their contacts with Marx and Engels in Brussels. Georg Weerth, who had become a friend of Engels in England in 1843,

Return to Prussia.

There was a revolution in France in 1848 that soon spread to other Western European countries. These events caused Engels and Marx to return to their homeland of the Kingdom of Prussia, specifically to the city of Cologne. While living in Cologne, they created and served as editors for a new daily newspaper called the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung". Besides Marx and Engels, other frequent contributors to the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" included Karl Schapper, Wilhelm Wolff, Ernst Dronke, Peter Nothjung, Heinrich Bürgers, Ferdinand Wolf and Carl Cramer. Friedrich Engels's mother, herself, gives unwitting witness to the effect of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" on the revolutionary uprising in Cologne in 1848. Criticising

Back in Britain.

To help Marx with the new publishing effort in London, "Neue Rheinische Zeitung Politisch-ökonomische Revue", Engels sought ways to escape the continent and travel to London. On 5 October 1849, Engels arrived in the Italian port city of Genoa. There, Engels booked passage on the English schooner, "Cornish Diamond" under the command of a Captain Stevens. The voyage across the western Mediterranean, around the Iberian Peninsula by sailing schooner took about five weeks. Finally, on 10 November 1849 the "Cornish Diamond" sailed up the River Thames to London with Engels on board.  Upon his return to Britain, Engels re-entered the Manchester company in which his father held shares in order to support Marx financially as he worked on "Das Kapital".  Unlike his first period in England (1843), Engels was now under police surveillance. He had "official" homes and "unofficial

Later years.

After Marx's death, Engels devoted much of his remaining years to editing Marx's unfinished volumes of "Das Kapital". However, he also contributed significantly in other areas. Engels made an argument using anthropological evidence of the time to show that family structures changed over history, and that the concept of monogamous marriage came from the necessity within class society for men to control women to ensure their own children

Personality.

Engels's interests included poetry, fox hunting, and hosting regular Sunday parties for London's left-wing intelligentsia where, as one regular put it, "no one left before two or three in the morning". His stated personal motto was "take it easy", while "jollity" was listed as his favourite virtue.  Of Engels’ personality and appearance, Robert Heilbroner in The Worldly Philosophers described him as "tall and fair and rather elegant, he had the figure of a man who liked to fence and to ride to hounds and who had once swum the Weser River four times without a break." as

Legacy.

Vladimir Lenin wrote: "After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilised world... In their scientific works, Marx and Engels were the first to explain that socialism is not the invention of dreamers, but the final aim and necessary result of the development of the productive forces in modern society. All recorded history hitherto has been a history of class struggle, of the succession of the rule and victory of certain social classes over others."  However, Tristram Hunt argues that Engels has become a convenient scapegoat, too easily blamed for the state crimes of the Soviet Union, Communist Southeast Asia and China. "Engels is left holding the bag of 20th century ideological extremism," Hunt writes, "while Marx is rebranded as the acceptable, post–political seer of global capitalism." Hunt largely exonerates Engels stating that "in no intelligible sense can Engels or Marx bear culpability for the crimes of historical actors carried out generations later, even if the policies were offered up in their honor."  Other writers, while admitting the distance between Marx and Engels and Stalin, are less charitable, noting for example that the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicted the oppressive potential of their ideas. "It is a fallacy that Marxism's flaws were

Major works.

"The Holy Family" (1844).

This book was written by Marx and Engels in November 1844. It is a critique on the Young Hegelians and their trend of thought which was very popular in academic circles at the time. The title was suggested by the publisher and is meant as a sarcastic reference to the Bauer

"The Condition of the Working Class in England" (1845).

A study of the deprived conditions of the working class in Manchester and Salford, based on Engel's personal observations. The work also contains seminal thoughts on

"The Peasant War in Germany" (1850).

An account of the early 16th-century uprising known as the

"Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science" (1878).

Popularly known as "Anti-Dühring", this book is a detailed critique of the philosophical positions of Eugen Dühring, a German philosopher and critic of Marxism. In the course of replying to Dühring, Engels reviews recent

"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" (1880).

One of the best selling socialist books of the era, Engels critiques the utopian socialists, such as Charles Fourier and

"Dialectics of Nature" (1883).

"Dialectics of Nature" (German: "Dialektik der Natur") is an unfinished 1883 work by Engels

"The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" (1884).

In this work, Engels argues that the family is an ever-changing institution that has been

Influences.

Engels‘ own beliefs were influenced by Charles Fourier. From Fourier, he derives four main points that characterize the social conditions of a communist state. The first point maintains that every individual would be able to fully develop their talents by eliminating the specialization of production. Without specialization, every individual would be permitted to exercise any vocation of their choosing for as long or as little as they would like. If talents permitted it, one could be a baker for a year and an engineer the next. The second point builds upon the first: with the ability of workers to cycle through different jobs of their choosing, the fundamental basis of the social division of labour is destroyed, and the social division of labour will disappear as a result. If anyone can employ himself at any job that he wishes, then there are clearly no longer any divisions or barriers to entry for labour. Otherwise, such fluidity between entirely different jobs would not exist. The third point continues from the second: once the social division of labour is gone, the division of social classes based on property ownership will fade with it. If labour division puts a man in charge of a farm, that farmer owns the productive resources of that farm. The same applies to the ownership of a factory or a bank. Without labour division, no single social class may claim exclusive rights to a particular means of production since the absence of labour division allows all to use it. Finally, the fourth point concludes that the elimination of social classes destroys the sole purpose of the state and it will cease to exist. As Engels stated in his own writing, the only purpose of the state is to abate the effects of class antagonisms. With the elimination of social classes based on property, the state becomes obsolete and a communist society, at least in the eyes of Engels, is achieved.

Friedrich Engels ( ; ; sometimes anglicised Frederick Engels; 28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, historian, communist, social scientist, sociologist, journalist and businessman. His father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford, England, and Barmen, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany).

Friedrich Engels, né le à Barmen et mort le à Londres, est un philosophe et théoricien socialiste et communiste allemand, grand ami de Karl Marx. Après la mort de ce dernier, il assure, à partir des brouillons laissés par son ami, la rédaction définitive et la publication des livres II et III du "Capital". Engels a été militant de la Ligue des communistes et de l'Association internationale des travailleurs.


Overview.

NYSE Euronext offers a broad and growing array of financial products and services in cash equities, futures, options, exchange-traded products (ETPs), bonds, market data, and commercial technology. Spanning multiple asset classes and six countries, the company's exchanges include the New York Stock Exchange, Liffe, Euronext and NYSE Arca. With more than 8,000 listed issues (which includes 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80% of the S&P 500, trading on NYSE Euronext's equity markets represents more than one-third of the world's cash equities volume. The company also manages the leading European derivatives exchange by value of trading.  NYSE Euronext is part of the S&P 500 index and the only exchange operator in the S&P 100 index.  NYSE Euronext is a Delaware corporation, though the principal executive office of NYSE Euronext is located at 11 Wall Street, New York, New York 10005. The European headquarters are at 39 Rue Cambon, 75001 in Paris, France.

Locations.

Below is a list of major NYSE Euronext locations:

Mergers and acquisitions.

NYSE and Archipelago Holdings.

The merger between NYSE and Archipelago Holdings was initially approved in 2005 by a 95% majority of voting NYSE members. The acquisition of Archipelago, which held possession of highly regarded market technology at the time, was intended to bring automated trading to NYSE markets (which had previously utilized an "open outcry" system) and increase efficiency.  For the first time in its 213-year history, the New York Stock Exchange became a for-profit company, and began trading publicly on its own stock exchange under the NYX ticker. Owners of the 1,366 NYSE seats received 80,177 shares of NYSE Group stock plus $300,000 in cash and $70,571 in dividends for each seat. The completion of this deal created two new branches of the NYSE Group: NYSE Arca and NYSE Arca Europe, which launched after the acquisition of Euronext.

NYSE Group and Euronext merger April 4, 2007.

In April 2006, NYSE Group and Euronext signed a merger agreement, subject to shareholder vote and regulatory approval. Euronext shareholders gave approval to the transaction on December 19, 2006, and shareholders from the NYSE Group followed suit one day later. In April 2007 the Euronext shareholders tendering shares can receive NYSE shares and cash amounting to $11,141 million from NYSE Euronext for their assets. About 94% of the 112,557,259 shares are tendered in the first round.  The NYSE Group and Euronext merger on April 4, 2007, signaled the creation of the world's largest and most liquid exchange group—NYSE Euronext.

NYSE Euronext and NYFIX.

NYSE Euronext, through its wholly owned subsidiary NYSE Technologies, Inc. acquired NYFIX, Inc. (Nasdaq: NYFX) for $144 million in November 2009. NYSE Euronext incorporated NYFIX's trading software into the company's package of offerings to customers.

Attempted merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse.

In 2011, "Bloomberg" reported that the German exchange operator Deutsche Börse was in advanced talks to buy NYSE Euronext for $9.53 billion in a deal that would create the world's largest trading powerhouse. The shares of both companies were temporarily frozen on the news due to the risk of large price movements and clarifications of the deal. A successful deal would see the new company becoming the world's largest stock exchange operator with a market capitalization of listed companies equal to $15 trillion.  The proposed group would have dual headquarters, in Deutsche Boerse's newly built green tower near Frankfurt, Germany, and in New York City at 11 Wall Street. It would be led by a board with seventeen members—fifteen directors plus the Chairman and the CEO. Of the fifteen directors, nine to be designated by Deutsche Boerse and six by NYSE Euronext. Current NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer would assume the same role with the newly founded company and would lead an Executive Committee with an equal number of current Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext executives.  On July 7, 2011, NYSE Euronext shareholders voted in favor of the merger, and on July 13, 2011, Deutsche Boerse shareholders approved the deal as well. These decisions move the two sides closer to completing the transaction, which must still pass through forty separate regulatory approval processes to be finalized.  The merger was subject to review in both the United States and with the European Union (EU) for concerns it could create a “"de facto" monopoly”. In October 2011, CEO Niederauer said the company had received the EU's so-called statement of objections, which was more than 100 pages long, and would be responding within two weeks, possibly by asking for the opportunity for an oral hearing with the regulators. The EU examination of the proposal formally began June 29 has said its expanded probe has a Dec. 13 deadline. In March, Joaquín Almunia, the EU's antitrust commissioner, expressed concern that the deal would maybe monopolize the derivatives market due to Deutsche Boerse's “vertical silo” which routes all trade clearing through its own services. Almunia said then he preferred a “more open business model” for markets.  On December 22, 2011, Deutsche Boerse won U.S. antitrust approval to buy NYSE Euronext, on condition that a Deutsche Boerse subsidiary, the International Securities Exchange, divest its 31.5 percent interest in Direct Edge. NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse AG delayed the deadline for completing their merger until March 31, 2012 so the exchange operators could try to persuade European regulators to approve the deal.  On February 1, 2012, the European Union blocked the planned merger between NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse. The European Commission—the EU's executive body—ruled against the merger because, they said, the combined exchange would control more than 90% of the trade in European derivatives. The European Commission report stated, "The merger between Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext would have led to a near-monopoly in European financial derivatives worldwide... These markets are at the heart of the financial system and it is crucial for the whole European economy that they remain competitive".  On February 2, 2012, the NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse agreed with strong opposition by the EU for the planned merger, to scrap the merger.

Intercontinental Exchange acquisition of NYSE Euronext.

On December 20, 2012, the boards of directors of both Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and the NYSE Euronext approved an $8 billion acquisition of NYSE Euronext. Under the terms shareholders of NYSE would receive either $33.12 in cash for each share or.2581 IntercontinentalExchange Inc. shares, or a combination of $11.27 in cash per share plus.1703 shares of stock. The acquisition is subject to regulator approval, though since the operations of ICE and NYSE have little in common—ICE is largely devoted to trading commodities, as opposed to NYSE's business of trading stocks and securities—the deal is not expected to be blocked. ICE said that after the deal closed it would sell the Euronext portion of the company, including stock exchanges in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris. The deal went through and Euronext is a sister division to NYSE and part of ICE. ICE CEO Jeffrey C. Sprecher would continue in that position at the combined company, while NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer would serve as president. The future of the New York Stock Exchange's historic trading floor under ICE has not been announced. ICE closed the high profile and historic trading floors of its other earlier acquisitions—the International Petroleum Exchange and the New York Board of Trade in New York.

Company structure.

Derivatives.

The Derivatives segment consists of NYSE Euronext's derivatives trading and clearing businesses. This includes NYSE Liffe, NYSE Liffe Clearing, NYSE Liffe US, NYSE Amex Options, NYSE Arca Option, and related derivatives market data.

NYSE Liffe.

NYSE Liffe comprises the derivatives market operated by LIFFE Administration and Management, Euronext Amsterdam, Euronext Brussels, Euronext Lisbon, and Euronext Paris. It offers customers the advantages of one of the most technologically advanced derivatives trading platforms as well as one of the widest choices of products of any derivatives market.  Through a single electronic trading platform, NYSE Liffe offers customers access to a wide range of interest-rate, equity, index, commodity and currency derivative products. This platform has been designed to handle significant order flows and transaction volumes. Orders can be matched either on a price/time or pro rata basis, configurable by contract, with transacted prices and volumes and the aggregate size of all bids and offers at each price level updated on a real-time basis. Users can continually notified of all active orders in the central order book, making market depth easy to monitor.  NYSE Liffe also offers its customers the Bclear and Cscreen services, which bridge the listed and over-the-counter (OTC) markets. This provides a simple and cost-effective way to register and process wholesale derivatives trades through NYSE Liffe to clearing at NYSE Liffe Clearing. Following the launch of NYSE Liffe Clearing, NYSE Liffe assumed full responsibility for clearing activities on its own London market.  NYSE Liffe US, NYSE Euronext's U.S. futures exchange, makes available for trading full- and mini-sized gold and silver futures, options on full-sized gold and silver futures and futures on Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Indices. A significant minority equity stake in NYSE Liffe US is held by six external investors: Citadel Securities, DRW Investments, Getco, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and UBS. Under this ownership structure, NYSE Euronext remains the largest shareholder in the entity and consolidates its financial reporting. NYSE Euronext manages the day-to-day operations of NYSE Liffe US, which operates under the supervision of a separate board of directors.

NYSE Amex Options.

The NYSE Amex Options business uses a hybrid model combining both auction-based and electronic trading capabilities that is designed to provide a stable, liquid and less volatile market. This feature provides the opportunity for price and/or size improvement.  In 2010, NYSE Euronext announced the sale of a significant equity interest in NYSE Amex Options to seven external investors: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, Citadel Securities, Citi, Goldman Sachs, TD Ameritrade, and UBS. Under the framework, NYSE Euronext remains the largest shareholder in the entity and manages the day-to-day operations of NYSE Amex Options, which operates under the supervision of a separate board of directors and chief executive officer. NYSE Euronext consolidates this entity for financial reporting purposes.

NYSE Arca Options.

NYSE Arca Options, the other of NYSE Euronext's two U.S. options exchanges, offers immediate, cost-effective electronic order execution in nearly two thousand options issues. The NYSE Arca Options business uses a technology platform and market structure designed to enhance the speed and quality of trade execution for its customers, as well as to attract additional sources of liquidity. Its structure allows market makers to access its markets remotely and integrates floor-based participants as well.

Cash Trading and Listings.

The Cash Trading and Listings segment includes the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext, NYSE Amex, NYSE Arca, NYSE Alternext, NYSE Arca Europe, SmartPool, BlueNext, and NYSE Blue, as well as related cash trading market data.

New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange is registered as a national securities exchange under the Exchange Act. In addition to common stock, preferred stock and warrants, the NYSE lists debt and corporate structured products, such as capital securities, mandatory convertibles, and repackaged securities.

Euronext.

Euronext is the first integrated cross-border exchange, combining the stock exchanges of Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon into a single market. Issuers who meet European Union regulatory standards are qualified for listing on the regulated markets operated by Euronext. The company's exchanges list a wide variety of securities, including domestic and international equity securities, convertible bonds, warrants, trackers and debt securities, including corporate and government bonds.  All of Euronext's markets are operated by its subsidiaries, each of which holds a national license as an exchange operator.

NYSE Amex.

NYSE Euronext completed its acquisition of the Amex (American Stock Exchange) on October 1, 2008. The transaction extended NYSE Euronext's leadership in U.S. option, cash equities, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), making it the third largest U.S. equity options marketplace based on number of contracts traded. Since the merger, Amex has been integrated into the company, with former Amex listings now trading directly on the NYSE, and has begun trading certain Nasdaq-listed securities.  NYSE Arca is the first electronic market to offer listed ETP issuers a Lead Market Maker program, which encourages liquidity provision that contributes to the best prices and depth in the ETP marketplace. It is registered as a national securities exchange under the Exchange Act.

NYSE Alternext.

NYSE Alternext was created by NYSE Euronext to meet the needs of small and mid-sized companies seeking simplified access to the stock market. Its streamlined listing requirements and trading rules are suited to the size and business needs of such firms. The rules also ensure investor transparency. NYSE Alternext's special listing procedures, unique market model, and listings of sponsor companies for members are its most notable features.  NYSE Alternext is an exchange-regulated market with a lighter regulatory regime. It is not a regulated market as defined by the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), but rather is regulated by NYSE Euronext through a body of rules applicable to intermediaries and listed companies.

NYSE Arca Europe.

NYSE Arca Europe is a pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF) that extends the trading scope of Euronext's regulated markets by adding blue-chip stocks from 14 European countries: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Arca Europe integrates this trading facility with the other business components of the company, giving customers the flexibility in trading of an MTF while maintaining the global market reach of NYSE Euronext.

SmartPool.

SmartPool Trading Limited is a UK-registered company supplying an MTF approved by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). It provides an exchange-led dark pool for the execution of block orders covering 15 different European markets, with a full central counter party back-end through LCH.Clearnet and EuroCCP. SmartPool was created by NYSE Euronext in partnership with BNP Paribas, HSBC, and J.P. Morgan Chase.

BlueNext and NYSE Blue.

NYSE Euronext holds a 60% interest in BlueNext with the remaining 40% held by CDC Climat. BlueNext operates a spot market in carbon dioxide emission allowances and credits that is the European leader in the field. It seeks to establish a leading position in trading in environment-related instruments, and has also launched a futures market with physical delivery of allowances and credits.  In September 2010, NYSE Euronext announced plans to create NYSE Blue, a new global company that will focus on environmental and sustainable energy markets. NYSE Euronext contributed its ownership in BlueNext in return for a majority interest in NYSE Blue, and APX, Inc. (a leading provider of regulatory infrastructure and services for environmental and sustainable energy markets) will contribute its business in return for a minority interest in the venture. The transaction closed on February 18, 2011.

Information Services and Technology Solutions.

The Information Services and Technology Solutions segment refers to NYSE Euronext's commercial technology transactions, data, and infrastructure businesses. NYSE Euronext operates NYSE Technologies, Free Market, and also owns NYFIX, Inc.

NYSE Technologies.

NYSE Technologies is the commercial technology division of NYSE Euronext.  NYSE Technologies operates five business:

Marché Libre.

The Free Markets of Brussels and Paris, organized by NYSE Euronext, are not regulated markets in the sense of the EU Directive. The criteria for admission to these markets are much simpler, and listing costs are low. They provide a channel for disseminating buy and sell orders, with trades executed by NYSE Euronext member firms. The securities traded on these markets have not gone through any admission procedures and issuers are not subject to any disclosure requirements. The Free Markets serve companies that are too young or too small to be listed on one of the regulated compartments of NYSE Euronext.

NYSE Regulation and FINRA.

On May 4, 2010, NYSE Euronext and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced that FINRA would assume responsibility for performing the market surveillance and enforcement functions originally conducted by NYSE Regulation. The agreement was subject to review by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was completed in June 2010.  Under the announced agreement, FINRA assumed regulatory functions for NYSE Euronext's U.S. equities and options markets – the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Arca, and NYSE Amex. NYSE Euronext, through its subsidiary NYSE Regulation, remains ultimately responsible for overseeing FINRA's performance of regulatory services for the NYSE markets.

Libor administration.

In early 2014, NYSE Euronext took over the administration of the London interbank offered rate from the British Bankers Association. The new administrator is NYSE Euronext Rates Administration Limited, a London-based, UK registered company, regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

Global marketing and branding.

NYSE Euronext maintains an active marketing campaign, both for its own brand, as well as for its listed companies. The Global Marketing and Branding department is responsible for the full spectrum of NYSE Euronext's brand marketing, including advertising, marketing communications, event management, and market research.  Through the NYSE Global Partnership Program, NYSE Euronext has created a series of strategic resources to support its listed companies' growth initiatives, so as to act as a conduit that enables them to reach new and important audiences. NYSE Euronext's 8,000 listed issues provide members with an extensive network of global investors and business leaders with which to interact. The company offers opportunities for co-branded advertising, linking listed companies to one another, as well as to the powerful brand that is NYSE Euronext.

Events.

The Events department of NYSE Euronext is responsible for coordinating bell ceremonies, receptions, conferences, and street events. Beginning in 2010, the NYSE Euronext opened its doors to non-listed companies to utilize NYSE facilities for after-hours events.

Opening and closing ceremonies.

The opening and closing bell ceremonies hosted by the NYSE date back to 1903, taking place Monday through Friday at 9:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. respectively in New York City.  The opportunity to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange has long been considered an honor. Representatives from listed companies, especially newly listed companies and IPOs, celebrities, politicians, and other dignitaries have become fixtures at the bell podium. Bell ceremonies are seen by millions, and are the most widely watched TV events each day.  The bell tradition has been extended to the branches in Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon. In Amsterdam, the opening bell was replaced by a gong, which is sounded the signal the beginning and end of the trading day. In the European offices, the opening and closing ceremonies take place at 9:00 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., respectively.

Experience Square.

The Broad Street area in front of the Exchange is known as Experience Square, where listed companies are able to market themselves and their products directly to the thousands of visitors to New York's Financial District each day. The façade of the exchange is often used as a billboard to showcase branding and new listings.

"NYSE Magazine".

"NYSE Magazine" is NYSE Euronext's quarterly publication. It provides insights into the world’s best companies, giving readers a close-up look at the distinguished leaders who constitute the Exchange community. Written for a sophisticated audience of CEOs and other senior global executives, each issue centers on what makes companies succeed. Designed to foster a sense of community among the NYSE’s key constituents, NYSE magazine has grown to become a strategic tool for business leaders that delivers opinions, strategies and insights from their peers. Extended articles, Q&As, videos, photo, and slideshows are now available at www.nysemagazine.com and on iPad via the NYSE magazine app. NYSE magazine print and digital editions reach thousands of opinion leaders around the globe, including top management of publicly traded and private companies, government officials, the financial community and the media. NYSE ceased production of the print edition in 2013 and currently publishes content exclusively online.

NYSE Euronext, Inc. was a Euro-American multinational financial services corporation that operated multiple securities exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext and NYSE Arca (formerly known as ArcaEx). NYSE merged with Archipelago Holdings on March 7, 2006, forming NYSE Group, Inc. On April 4, 2007, NYSE Group, Inc. merged with Euronext N.V. to form the first global equities exchange, with its headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The corporation was then acquired by Intercontinental Exchange, which subsequently spun off Euronext.

NYSE Euronext était un groupe mondial d'entreprises de marchés financiers (c'est-à-dire de sociétés commerciales qui avaient pour activités d'assurer la gestion d'un ou plusieurs marchés financiers). Le groupe est né en 2007 du rapprochement entre le New York Stock Exchange et Euronext. Le groupe est, depuis le, passé sous le contrôle d'Intercontinental Exchange Group Inc.


Synopsis.

Most of the book weaves in and out of two timelines. In the frame tale of the narrative present, Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek in the Rego Park neighborhood of New York City in 1978–79. The story that Vladek tells unfolds in the narrative past, which begins in the mid-1930s and continues until the end of the Holocaust in 1945.  In Rego Park in 1958, a young Art Spiegelman is skating with his friends when he falls down and hurts himself, but his friends keep going. When he returns home, he finds his father Vladek, who asks him why he is upset, and Art proceeds to tell him that his friends left him behind. His father responds in broken English, "Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week, then you could see what it is, friends!"  As an adult, Art visits his father, from whom he has become estranged. Vladek has remarried to a woman called Mala since the suicide of Art's mother Anja in 1968. Art asks Vladek to recount his Holocaust experiences. Vladek tells of his time in the Polish city of Częstochowa and how he came to marry into Anja's wealthy family in 1937 and move to Sosnowiec to become a manufacturer. Vladek begs Art not to include this in the book and Art reluctantly agrees. Anja suffers a breakdown due to postpartum depression after giving birth to their first son Richieu, and the couple go to a sanitarium in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for her to recover. After they return, political and anti-Semitic tensions build until Vladek is drafted just before the Nazi invasion. Vladek is captured at the front and forced to work as a prisoner of war. After his release, he finds Germany has annexed Sosnowiec and he is dropped off on the other side of the border in the German protectorate. He sneaks across the border and reunites with his family.  During one of Art's visits, he finds that a friend of Mala's has sent the couple one of the underground comix magazines Art contributed to. Mala had tried to hide it, but Vladek finds and reads it. In "Prisoner on the Hell Planet", Art

Background.

Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Sweden to Polish Jews and Holocaust survivors Vladek and Anja Spiegelman. An aunt poisoned their first son Richieu to avoid capture by the Nazis four years before Spiegelman's birth. He and his parents emigrated to the United States in 1951. During his youth his mother occasionally talked about Auschwitz, but his father did not want him to know about it.  Spiegelman developed an interest in comics early and began drawing professionally at 16. He spent a month in Binghamton State Mental Hospital in 1968 after a nervous breakdown. Shortly after he got out, his mother committed suicide. Spiegelman's father was not happy with his son's involvement in the hippie subculture. Spiegelman said that when he bought himself a German Volkswagen it damaged their already-strained relationship "beyond repair". Around this time, Spiegelman read in fanzines about such graphic artists as Frans Masereel who had made wordless novels. The discussions in those fanzines about making the Great American Novel in comics inspired him.  Spiegelman became a key figure in the underground comix movement of the 1970s, both as cartoonist and editor. In 1972 Justin Green produced the semi-autobiographical comic book "Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary", which inspired other underground cartoonists to produce more personal and revealing work. The same year, Green asked Spiegelman to contribute a three-page strip for a comic named "Funny Aminals", which Green edited. Spiegelman wanted to do a strip about racism, and at first considered focusing on African Americans, with cats as Ku Klux Klan members chasing African-American mice. Instead, he turned to the Holocaust and depicted Nazi cats persecuting Jewish mice in a strip he titled "Maus". The tale was narrated to a mouse named "Mickey". After finishing the strip, Spiegelman visited his father to show him the finished work, which he had based in part on an anecdote he had heard about his father's Auschwitz experience. His father gave him further background information, which piqued Spiegelman's interest. Spiegelman recorded a series of interviews over four days with his father, which was to provide the basis of the longer "Maus". Spiegelman followed up with extensive research, reading survivors' accounts and talking to friends and family who had also survived. He got detailed information about Sosnowiec from a series of Polish pamphlets published after the war which detailed what happened to the Jews by region.  In 1973, Spiegelman produced a strip for "Short Order Comix" #1 about his mother's suicide called "Prisoner on the Hell Planet". The same year, he edited a pornographic, psychedelic book of quotations, and dedicated it to his mother. He spent the rest of the 1970s building his reputation making short avant-garde comics. He moved back to New York from San Francisco in 1975, which he admitted to his father only in 1977, by which time he had decided to work on a "very long comic book". He began another series of interviews with his father in 1978, and visited Auschwitz in 1979. He serialized the story in a comics and graphics magazine he and his wife Mouly began in 1980 called "Raw".

Publication history.

The first chapter of "Maus" appeared in December 1980 in the second issue of "Raw" as a small insert; a new chapter appeared in each issue until the magazine came to an end in 1991. Every chapter but the last appeared in "Raw".  Spiegelman struggled to find a publisher for a book edition of "Maus", but after a rave "New York Times" review of the serial in August 1986, Pantheon Books published the first six chapters in a volume called "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" and subtitled "My Father Bleeds History". Spiegelman was relieved that the book's publication preceded the theatrical release of the animated film "An American Tail" by three months, as he believed that the film, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, was inspired by "Maus" and wished to avoid comparisons with it.  The book found a large audience, partly because of its distribution through bookstores rather than the direct market comic shops where comic books were normally sold. "Maus" was difficult for critics and reviewers to classify, and also for booksellers, who needed to know on which shelves to place it. Though Pantheon pushed for the term "graphic novel", Spiegelman was not comfortable with this, as many book-length comics were being referred to as "graphic novels" whether or not they had novelistic qualities. He suspected the term's use was an attempt to validate the comics form, rather than to describe the content of the books. Spiegelman later came to accept the term, and with Drawn and Quarterly publisher Chris Oliveros successfully lobbied the Book Industry Study Group in the early 2000s to include "graphic novel" as a category in bookstores.  Pantheon collected the last five chapters in 1991 in a second volume subtitled "And Here My Troubles Began". Pantheon later collected the two volumes into soft- and hardcover two-volume boxed sets and single-volume editions. In 1994 the Voyager Company released "The Complete Maus" on CD-ROM, a collection which contained the original comics, Vladek's taped transcripts, filmed interviews, sketches, and other background material. The CD-ROM was based on HyperCard, a Macintosh-only application that has since become obsolete. In 2011 Pantheon Books published a companion to "The Complete Maus" entitled "MetaMaus", with further background material, including filmed footage of Vladek. The centerpiece of the book is a Spiegelman interview conducted by Hillary Chute. It also has interviews with Spiegelman's wife and children, sketches, photographs, family trees, assorted artwork, and a DVD with video, audio, photos, and an interactive version of "Maus".  Spiegelman dedicated "Maus" to his brother Richieu and his first daughter Nadja. The book's epigraph is a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."

Themes.

Presentation.

Spiegelman, like many of his critics, worries that "[r]eality is too much for comics... so much has to be left out or distorted", admitting that his presentation of the story may not be accurate. He takes a postmodern approach; "Maus" "feeds on itself", telling the story of how the story was made. It examines the choices Spiegelman made in the retelling of his father's memories, and the artistic choices he had to make—for example, when his French wife converts to Judaism, Spiegelman's character frets over whether to depict her as a frog, a mouse,

Memory.

To Marianne Hirsch, Spiegelman's life is "dominated by memories that are not his own". His work is one not of memory but of "postmemory"—a term she coined after encountering "Maus". This describes the relation of the children of survivors with the survivors themselves. While these children have not had their parents' experiences, they grow up with their parents' memories—the memory of another's memory—until the stories

Guilt.

Spiegelman displays his sense of guilt in many ways. He suffers anguish over his dead brother, Richieu, who perished in the Holocaust, and whom he feels he can never live up to. The eighth chapter, made after the publication and unexpected success of the first volume, opens with a guilt-ridden Spiegelman (now in human form, with

Racism.

Spiegelman parodies the Nazis' vision of racial divisions; Vladek's racism is also put on display when he becomes upset that Françoise would pick up a black hitchhiker, a "schwartser" as he says. When she berates him, a victim of antisemitism, for his attitude, he replies, "It's not even to compare, the schwartsers and the Jews!" Spiegelman gradually deconstructs the animal metaphor throughout the book, especially in the second volume, showing where the lines cannot be drawn between races

Language.

Vladek's English is broken in contrast with that of Art's more fluent therapist, Paul Pavel, who is also an immigrant and Holocaust survivor. Vladek's knowledge of the language helps him several times during the story, as when he uses it to meet Anja. He also uses it to befriend a Frenchman, and continues to correspond with him in English after the war. His recounting of the Holocaust, first to American soldiers, then to his son, is never in his mother tongue, and English becomes his daily

Style.

Spiegelman's perceived audacity in using the Holocaust as his subject was compounded by his telling the story in comics. The prevailing view in the English-speaking world held comics as inherently trivial, thus degrading Spiegelman's subject matter, especially as he used animal heads in place of recognizably human ones. Funny animals have been a staple of comics, and while they have a traditional reputation as children's fare, the underground had long made use of them in adult stories, for example in Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat, which comics critic Joseph Witek asserts shows that the genre could "open up the way to a paradoxical narrative realism" that "Maus" exploited.  Ostensibly about the Holocaust, the story entwines with the frame tale of Art interviewing and interacting with his father. Art's "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" is also encompassed by the frame, and stands in visual and thematical contrast with the rest of the book as the characters are in human form in a surreal, German Expressionist woodcut style inspired by Lynd Ward.  Spiegelman blurs the line between the frame and the world, such as when neurotically trying to deal with what "Maus" is becoming for him, he says to his wife, "In real life you'd never have let me talk this long without interrupting." When a prisoner whom the Nazis believe to be a Jew claims to be German, Spiegelman has difficulty deciding whether to present this character as a cat or a mouse. Throughout the book, Spiegelman incorporates and highlights banal details from his father's tales, sometimes humorous or ironic, giving a lightness and humanity to the story which "helps carry the weight of the unbearable historical realities".  Spiegelman started taking down his interviews with Vladek on paper, but quickly switched to a tape recorder, face-to-face or over the phone. Spiegelman often condensed Vladek's words, and occasionally added to the dialogue or synthesized multiple retellings into a single portrayal.  Spiegelman worried about the effect that his organizing of Vladek's story would have on its authenticity. In the end, he eschewed a Joycean approach and settled on a linear narrative he thought would be better at "getting things across". He strove to present how the book was recorded and organized as an integral part of the book itself, expressing the "sense of an interview shaped by a relationship".

Artwork.

The story is text-driven, with few wordless panels in its 1,500 black-and-white panels. The art has high contrast, with heavy black areas and thick black borders balanced against areas of white and wide white margins. There is little gray in the shading. In the narrative present, the pages are arranged in eight-panel grids; in the narrative past, Spiegelman found himself "violating the grid constantly" with his page layouts.  Spiegelman rendered the original three-page "Maus" and "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" in highly detailed, expressive styles. Spiegelman planned to draw "Maus" in such a manner, but after initial sketches he decided to use a pared-down

Influences.

Spiegelman has published articles promoting a greater knowledge of his medium's history. Chief among his early influences were Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner, and Bernard Krigstein's "Master Race". Though he acknowledged Eisner's early work as an influence, he denied that Eisner's first graphic novel, "A Contract with God" (1978), had any impact on "Maus". He

Reception and legacy.

Spiegelman's work as cartoonist and editor had long been known and respected in the comics community, but the media attention after the first volume's publication in 1986 was unexpected. Hundreds of overwhelmingly positive reviews appeared, and "Maus" became the center of new attention focused on comics. It was considered one of the "Big Three" book-form comics from around 1986–1987, along with "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns", that are said to have brought the term "graphic novel" and the idea of comics for adults into mainstream consciousness. It was credited with changing the public's perception of what comics could be at a time when, in the English-speaking world, they were considered to be for children, and strongly associated with superheroes. Initially, critics of "Maus" showed a reluctance to include comics in literary discourse. "The New York Times" intended praise when saying of the book, "Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comic books". After its Pulitzer Prize win, it won greater acceptance and interest among academics. The Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition on the making of "Maus" in 1991–92.  "Maus" proved difficult to classify to a genre, and has been called biography, fiction, autobiography, history, and memoir. Spiegelman petitioned "The New York Times" to move it from "fiction" to "non-fiction" on the newspaper's bestseller list, saying, "I shudder to think how David Duke... would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father's memories of life in Hitler's Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction". An editor responded, "Let's go out to Spiegelman's house and if a giant mouse answers the door, we'll move it to the nonfiction side of the list!" The "Times" eventually acquiesced. The Pulitzer committee sidestepped the issue by giving the completed "Maus" a Special Award in Letters in 1992.  "Maus" ranked highly on comics and literature lists. "The Comics Journal" called it the fourth greatest comics work of the 20th century, and "Wizard" placed it first on their list of 100 Greatest Graphic Novels. "Entertainment Weekly" listed "Maus" at seventh place on their list of "The New Classics: Books – The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008", and "Time" put "Maus" at seventh place on their list of best non-fiction books from between 1923 and 2005, and fourth on their list of top graphic novels. Praise for the book also came from contemporaries such as Jules Feiffer and literary writers such as Umberto Eco. Spiegelman turned down numerous offers to have "Maus" adapted for film or television.  Early installments of "Maus" that appeared in "Raw" inspired the young Chris Ware to "try to do comics that had a'serious' tone to them". "Maus" is cited as a primary influence on graphic novels such as Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" and Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home".  In 1999, cartoonist Ted Rall had an article published in "The Village Voice" criticizing Spiegelman's prominence and influence in the New York cartooning community. Entitled "King "Maus": Art Spiegelman Rules the World of Comix With Favors and Fear", it accused the Pulitzer board of opportunism in selecting "Maus", which Rall deemed unworthy. Cartoonist Danny Hellman responded to the piece with a prank email in which Hellman posed as Rall, soliciting discussion at the email address TedRallsBalls@onelist.com. Hellman followed up by posting fake responses from New York magazine editors and art directors. Rall launched a lawsuit seeking damages of $1.5 million for libel, breach of privacy, and causing emotional distress. To raise funds to fight the suit, in 2001 Hellman had the "Legal Action Comics" anthology published, which included a back cover by Spiegelman in which he depicts Rall as a urinal.

Academic work and criticism.

A cottage industry of academic research has built up around "Maus", and schools have frequently used it as course material in a range of fields: history, dysfunctional family psychology, language arts, and social studies. The volume of academic work published on "Maus" far surpasses that of any other work of comics. One of the earliest such works was Joshua Brown's 1988 "Of Mice and Memory" from the "Oral History Review", which deals with the problems Spiegelman faced in presenting his father's story. Marianne Hirsch wrote an influential essay on post-memory called "Family Pictures: "Maus", Mourning, and Post-Memory", later expanded into a book called "Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory". Academics far outside the field of comics such as Dominick LaCapra, Linda Hutcheon, and Terrence Des Pres took part in the discourse. Few approached "Maus" who were familiar with comics, largely because of the lack of an academic comics tradition—"Maus" tended to be approached as Holocaust history or from a film or literary perspective. In 2003, Deborah Geis edited a collection of essays on "Maus" called "Considering "Maus": Approaches to Art Spiegelman's "Survivor's Tale" of the Holocaust". "Maus" is considered an important work of Holocaust literature, and studies of it have made significant contributions to Holocaust studies.  According to writer Arie Kaplan, some Holocaust survivors objected to Spiegelman making a comic book out of their tragedy. Literary critics such as Hillel Halkin objected that

Parodies.

Belgian publisher La Cinquième Couche anonymously produced a book called "Katz", a remix of Spiegelman's book with all animal heads replaced with

Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Critics have classified "Maus" as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (the Special Award in Letters).

Maus est une bande dessinée de l'Américain Art Spiegelman publiée de 1980 à 1991 aux États-Unis. L'œuvre se fonde sur les entretiens entre l'auteur et son père, rescapé des camps de la mort : c'est le récit de la transmission de la Shoah, en particulier les persécutions et l'extermination des Juifs en Pologne dans les années 1930 et 1940.


Biography.

Early life.

André Le Nôtre was born in Paris, into a family of gardeners. Pierre Le Nôtre, who was in charge of the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries in 1572, may have been his grandfather. André's father Jean Le Nôtre was also responsible for sections of the Tuileries gardens, initially under Claude Mollet, and later as head gardener, during the reign of Louis XIII. André was born on 12 March 1613, and was baptised at the Église Saint-Roch. His godfather at the ceremony was an administrator of the royal gardens, and his godmother was the wife of Claude Mollet.  The family lived in a house within the Tuilieries, and André thus grew up surrounded by gardening, and quickly acquired both practical and theoretical knowledge. The location also allowed him to study in the nearby Palais du Louvre, part of which was then used as an academy of the arts. He learned mathematics, painting and architecture, and entered the "atelier" of Simon Vouet, painter to Louis XIII, where he met and befriended the painter Charles Le Brun. He learned classical art and perspective, and studied for several years under the architect François Mansart, a friend of Le Brun.

Career.

In 1635, Le Nôtre was named the principal gardener of the king's brother Gaston, duc d'Orléans. On 26 June 1637, Le Nôtre was appointed head gardener at the Tuileries, taking over his father's position. He had primary responsibility for the areas of the garden closest to the palace, including the orangery built by Simon Bouchard. In 1643 he was appointed "draughtsman of plants and terraces" for Anne of Austria, the queen mother, and from 1645 to 1646 he worked on the modernisation of the gardens of the Château de Fontainebleau.  He was later put in charge of all the royal gardens of France, and in 1657 he was further appointed Controller-General of the Royal Buildings. There are few direct references to Le Nôtre in the royal accounts, and Le Nôtre himself seldom wrote down his ideas or approach to gardening. He expressed himself purely through his gardens. He became a trusted advisor to Louis XIV, and in 1675 he was ennobled by the King. He and Le Brun even accompanied the court at the siege of Cambrai in 1677.  In 1640, he married Françoise Langlois. They had three children, although none survived to adulthood.

Vaux-le-Vicomte.

André Le Nôtre's first major garden design was undertaken for Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's Superintendent of Finances. Fouquet began work on the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1657, employing the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun, and Le Nôtre. The three designers worked in partnership, with Le Nôtre laying out a grand, symmetrical arrangement of parterres, pools and gravel walks. Le Vau and Le Nôtre exploited the changing levels across the site, so that the canal is invisible from the house, and employed forced perspective to make the grotto appear closer than it really is. The gardens were complete by 1661, when Fouquet held a grand entertainment for the king. But only three weeks later, on 10 September 1661, Fouquet was arrested for embezzling state funds, and his artists and craftsmen were taken into the king's service.

Versailles.

From 1661, Le Nôtre was working for Louis XIV to build and enhance the garden and parks of the Château de Versailles. Louis extended the existing hunting lodge, eventually making it his primary residence and seat of power. Le Nôtre also laid out the radiating city plan of Versailles, which included the largest avenue yet seen in Europe, the Avenue de Paris.  In the following century, the Versailles design influenced Pierre Charles L'Enfant's master plan for Washington, D.C. See, L'Enfant Plan.

Other gardens.

France.

In 1661, Le Nôtre was also working on the gardens at the Palace of Fontainebleau. In 1663 he was engaged at Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and Château de Saint-Cloud, residence of Philippe d'Orléans, where he would oversee works for many years. Also from 1663, Le Nôtre was engaged at Château de Chantilly, property of the Prince de Condé, where he worked with his brother-in-law Pierre Desgots until the 1680s. From 1664 he was rebuilding the gardens of the Tuileries, at the behest of Colbert, Louis's chief minister, who still hoped the king would remain in Paris. In 1667 Le Nôtre extended the main axis of the gardens westward, creating the avenue which would become the Champs-Élysées. Colbert commissioned Le Nôtre in 1670, to alter the gardens of his own château de Sceaux, which was ongoing until 1683.

Abroad.

In 1662, he provided designs for Greenwich Park in London, for Charles II of England. In 1670 Le Nôtre conceived a project for the Castle of Racconigi in Italy, and between 1674 and 1698 he remodelled the gardens of Venaria Reale, near Turin. In 1679, he visited Italy. His later advice was provided for Charlottenburg Palace and château de Cassel in Germany, and with plans for Windsor Castle.

Final works.

Between 1679 and 1691, he was involved in the planning of the gardens of Château de Meudon for François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois.  His work has often been favorably compared and contrasted ("the antithesis") to the œuvre of Lancelot "Capability" Brown, the English landscape architect.

In popular culture.

André Le Nôtre was played by Matthias Schoenaerts in the 2015 film "A Little Chaos".

André Le Nôtre (; 12 March 1613 – 15 September 1700), originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. Most notably, he was the landscape architect who designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, and his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or "jardin à la française".

André Le Nôtre ou André Le Nostre, né le à Paris où il meurt le, fut jardinier du roi Louis XIV de 1645 à 1700 et eut notamment pour tâche de concevoir l'aménagement du parc et des jardins du château de Versailles, mais aussi de celui de Vaux-le-Vicomte (pour Nicolas Fouquet) et Chantilly. Très fameux courtisan, il réussit à s'attirer les faveurs de Louis XIV, par une bonhomie probablement travaillée (en présence même du roi), qui lui vaut le surnom, de son vivant, de « bonhomme Le Nôtre ». Il sut se placer à l'écart des intrigues de la Cour et obtenir les bonnes grâces d'un roi passionné de jardins. Il est l'auteur des plans de beaucoup de jardins à la française.