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Radio drama

Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatized, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatized works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera.

Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s radio drama began losing its audience. However, it remains popular in much of the world.

Recordings of OTR (old-time radio) survive today in the audio archives of collectors, libraries and museums, as well as several online sites such as Internet Archive.

By the 21st century, radio drama had a minimal presence on terrestrial radio in the United States, with much American radio drama being restricted to rebroadcasts of programmes from previous decades. However, other nations still have thriving traditions of radio drama. In the United Kingdom, for example, the BBC produces and broadcasts hundreds of new radio plays each year on Radio 3, Radio 4, and Radio 4 Extra. Like the US, Australia's network the ABC has abandoned broadcasting drama but in New Zealand on RNZ, continues to promote and broadcast a variety of drama over its airwaves.

Thanks to advances in digital recording and Internet distribution, radio drama experienced a revival around 2010. Podcasting offered the means of inexpensively creating new radio dramas, in addition to the distribution of vintage programs.

The terms audio drama or audio theatre are sometimes used synonymously with radio drama; however, audio drama or audio theatre may not necessarily be intended specifically for broadcast on radio. Audio drama can also be found on CDs, cassette tapes, podcasts, webcasts, or other digital downloads as well as broadcast radio.

History
The Roman playwright Seneca has claim as a forerunner of radio drama because "his plays were performed by readers as sound plays, not by actors as stage plays... [I]n this respect Seneca had no significant successors until 20th-century technology made possible the widespread dissemination of sound plays."

1880–1930: early years
Radio drama traces its roots back to the 1880s: "In 1881 French engineer Clement Ader had filed a patent for 'improvements of Telephone Equipment in Theatres (Théâtrophone). English-language radio drama seems to have started in the United States. A Rural Line on Education, a brief sketch specifically written for radio, aired on Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1921, according to historian Bill Jaker. Newspaper accounts of the era report on a number of other drama experiments by America's commercial radio stations: KYW broadcast a season of complete operas from Chicago starting in November 1921. In February 1922, entire Broadway musical comedies with the original casts aired from WJZ's Newark studios. Actors Grace George and Herbert Hayes performed an entire play from a San Francisco station in the summer of 1922.

An important turning point in radio drama came when Schenectady, New York's WGY, after a successful tryout on August 3, 1922, began weekly studio broadcasts of full-length stage plays in September 1922, using music, sound effects and a regular troupe of actors, The WGY Players. Aware of this series, the director of Cincinnati's WLW began regularly broadcasting one-acts (as well as excerpts from longer works) in November. The success of these projects led to imitators at other stations. By early 1923, original dramatic pieces written specially for radio were airing on stations in Cincinnati (When Love Wakens by WLW's Fred Smith), Philadelphia (The Secret Wave by Clyde A. Criswell) and Los Angeles (At Home over KHJ). That same year, WLW (in May) and WGY (in September) sponsored scripting contests, inviting listeners to create original plays to be performed by those stations' dramatic troupes.

Listings in The New York Times and other sources for May 1923 reveal at least 20 dramatic offerings were scheduled (including one-acts, excerpts from longer dramas, complete three- and four-act plays, operettas and a Molière adaptation), either as in-studio productions or by remote broadcast from local theaters and opera houses. An early British drama broadcast was of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream on 2LO on 25 July 1923.

Serious study of American radio drama of the 1920s and early 1930s is, at best, very limited. Unsung pioneers of the art include: WLW's Fred Smith; Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll (who popularized the dramatic serial); The Eveready Hour creative team (which began with one-act plays but was soon experimenting with hour-long combinations of drama and music on its weekly variety program); the various acting troupes at stations like WLW, WGY, KGO and a number of others, frequently run by women like Helen Schuster Martin and Wilda Wilson Church; early network continuity writers like Henry Fisk Carlton, William Ford Manley and Don Clark; producers and directors like Clarence Menser and Gerald Stopp; and a long list of others who were credited at the time with any number of innovations but who are largely forgotten or undiscussed today. Elizabeth McLeod's 2005 book on Gosden and Correll's early work is a major exception, as is Richard J. Hand's 2006 study of horror radio, which examines some programs from the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Another notable early radio drama, one of the first specially written for the medium in the UK, was A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes, broadcast by the BBC on January 15, 1924, about a group of people trapped in a Welsh coal mine. One of the earliest and most influential French radio plays was the prize-winning Marémoto ('Seaquake'), by Gabriel Germinet and Pierre Cusy, which presents a realistic account of a sinking ship before revealing that the characters are actually actors rehearsing for a broadcast. Translated and broadcast in Germany and England by 1925, the play was originally scheduled by Radio-Paris to air on October 23, 1924, but was instead banned from French radio until 1937 because the government feared that the dramatic SOS messages would be mistaken for genuine distress signals.

In 1951, American writer and producer Arch Oboler suggested that Wyllis Cooper's Lights Out (1934–47) was the first true radio drama to make use of the unique qualities of radio: "Radio drama (as distinguished from theatre plays boiled down to kilocycle size) began at midnight, in the middle thirties, on one of the upper floors of Chicago's Merchandise Mart. The pappy was a rotund writer by the name of Wyllis Cooper."

Though the series is often remembered solely for its gruesome stories and sound effects, Cooper's scripts for Lights Out were later recognized as well written and offered innovations seldom heard in early radio dramas, including multiple first-person narrators, stream of consciousness monologues and scripts that contrasted a duplicitous character's internal monologue and his spoken words.

The question of who was the first to write stream-of-consciousness drama for radio is a difficult one to answer. By 1930, Tyrone Guthrie had written plays for the BBC like Matrimonial News (which consists entirely of the thoughts of a shopgirl awaiting a blind date) and The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick (which takes place inside the mind of a drowning man). After they were published in 1931, Guthrie's plays aired on the American networks. Around the same time, Guthrie himself also worked for the Canadian National Railway radio network, producing plays written by Merrill Denison that used similar techniques. A 1940 article in Variety credited a 1932 NBC play, Drink Deep by Don Johnson, as the first stream-of-consciousness play written for American radio. The climax of Lawrence Holcomb's 1931 NBC play Skyscraper also uses a variation of the technique (so that the listener can hear the final thoughts and relived memories of a man falling to his death from the title building).

There were probably earlier examples of stream-of-consciousness drama on the radio. For example, in December 1924, actor Paul Robeson, then appearing in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, performed a scene from the play over New York's WGBS to critical acclaim. Some of the many storytellers and monologists on early 1920s American radio might be able to claim even earlier dates.

1930–1960s: widespread popularity
Perhaps America's most famous radio drama broadcast is Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds (a 1938 version of H. G. Wells' novel), which inspired stories of a mass panic that, though greatly exaggerated, signaled the power of the form. By the late 1930s, radio drama was widely popular in the United States (and also in other parts of the world). There were dozens of programs in many different genres, from mysteries and thrillers, to soap operas and comedies. Among American playwrights, screenwriters and novelists who got their start in radio drama are Rod Serling and Irwin Shaw.

In Britain, however, during the 1930s BBC programming, tended to be more high brow, including the works of Shakespeare, Classical Greek drama, as well as the works of major modern playwrights, such as Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and so forth. Novels and short stories were also frequently dramatised. In addition the plays of contemporary writers and original plays were produced, with, for example, a broadcast of T. S. Eliot's famous verse play Murder in the Cathedral in 1936. By 1930, the BBC was producing "twice as many plays as London's West End" and were producing over 400 plays a year by the mid-1940s.

Producers of radio drama soon became aware that adapting stage plays for radio did not always work, and that there was a need for plays specifically written for radio, which recognized its potential as a distinct and different medium from the theatre. George Bernard Shaw's plays, for example, were seen as readily adaptable. However, in a lead article in the BBC literary journal The Listener, of 14 August 1929, which discussed the broadcasting of 12 great plays, it was suggested that while the theatrical literature of the past should not be neglected the future lay mainly with plays written specifically for the microphone.

In 1939–40, the BBC founded its own Drama Repertory Company which made a stock of actors readily available. After the war, the number was around 50. They performed in the great number of plays broadcast in the heyday of BBC radio drama of the 40s–60s.

Initially the BBC resisted American-style 'soap opera', but eventually highly popular serials, like Dick Barton, Special Agent (1946–51), Mrs Dale's Diary (1948–69) and The Archers (1950–), were produced. The Archers is still running and is the world's longest-running soap opera with a total of over 18,400 episodes. There had been some earlier serialized drama including, the six episode The Shadow of the Swastika (1939), Dorothy L. Sayers's The Man Born To Be King, in twelve episodes (1941), and Front Line Family (1941–48), which was broadcast to America as part of the effort to encourage the US to enter the war. The show's storylines depicted the trials and tribulations of a British family, the Robinsons, living through the war. This featured plots about rationing, family members missing in action and the Blitz. After the war in 1946 it was moved to the BBC Light Programme.

The BBC continued producing various kinds of drama, including docu-drama, throughout World War II; amongst the writers they employed were the novelist James Hanley and poet Louis MacNeice, who in 1941 became an employee of the BBC's. MacNeice's work for the BBC initially involved writing and producing radio programmes intended to build support for the US, and later Russia, through cultural programmes emphasising links between the countries rather than outright propaganda. By the end of the war MacNeice had written well over 60 scripts for the BBC, including Christopher Columbus (1942), which starred Laurence Olivier, The Dark Tower (1946), and a six-part radio adaptation of Goethe's Faust (1949).

Following World War II the BBC reorganized its radio provision, introducing two new channels to supplement the BBC Home Service (itself the result of the fusion in September 1939 of the pre-war National and Regional Programmes). These were the BBC Light Programme (dating from 29 July 1945 and a direct successor to the wartime General Forces Programme) and the BBC Third Programme (launched on 29 September 1946).

The BBC Light Programme, while principally devoted to light entertainment and music, carried a fair share of drama, both single plays (generally, as the name of the station indicated, of a lighter nature) and serials. In contrast, the BBC Third Programme, destined to become one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in post-war Britain, specialized in heavier drama (as well as the serious music, talks, and other features which made up its content): long-form productions of both classical and modern/experimental dramatic works sometimes occupied the major part of its output on any given evening. The Home Service, meanwhile, continued to broadcast more "middle-brow" drama (one-off plays and serializations) daily.

The high-water mark for BBC radio drama was the 1950s and 1960s, and during this period many major British playwrights either effectively began their careers with the BBC, or had works adapted for radio. Most of playwright Caryl Churchill's early experiences with professional drama production were as a radio playwright and, starting in 1962 with The Ants, she wrote nine productions with BBC radio drama up until 1973, when her stage work began to be recognised at the Royal Court Theatre. Joe Orton's dramatic debut in 1963 was the radio play The Ruffian on the Stair, which was broadcast on 31 August 1964.

Tom Stoppard's "first professional production was in the 15-minute Just Before Midnight programme on BBC Radio, which showcased new dramatists". John Mortimer made his radio debut as a dramatist in 1955, with his adaptation of his own novel Like Men Betrayed for the BBC Light Programme. However, he made his debut as an original playwright with The Dock Brief, starring Michael Hordern as a hapless barrister, first broadcast in 1957 on BBC Third Programme, later televised with the same cast and subsequently presented in a double bill with What Shall We Tell Caroline? at the Lyric Hammersmith in April 1958, before transferring to the Garrick Theatre. Mortimer is most famous for Rumpole of the Bailey, a British television series which starred Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister who defends any and all clients. It has been spun off into a series of short stories, novels, and radio programmes.

Giles Cooper was a pioneer in writing for radio, becoming prolific in both radio and television drama. His early successes included radio dramatisations of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and John Wyndham's classic science fiction novel Day of the Triffids. He was also successful in the theatre. The first of his radio plays to make his reputation was Mathry Beacon (1956), about a small detachment of men and women still guarding a Top Secret "missile deflector" somewhere in Wales, years after the war has ended. Bill Naughton's radio play Alfie Elkins and his Little Life (1962) was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 7 January 1962. In it Alfie, "[w]ith sublime amorality... swaggers and philosophises his way through" life. The action spans about two decades, from the beginning of World War II to the late 1950s. In 1964, Bill Naughton turned it into a stage play which was put on at London's Mermaid Theatre. Later, he wrote the screenplay for a film version, Alfie (1966), starring Michael Caine.

Other notable radio dramatists included Henry Reed, Brendan Behan, Rhys Adrian, Alan Plater; Anthony Minghella, Alan Bleasdale, and novelist Angela Carter. Novelist Susan Hill also wrote for BBC Radio, from the early 1970s. Henry Reed was especially successful with the Hilda Tablet plays. Irish playwright Brendan Behan, author of The Quare Fellow (1954), was commissioned by the BBC to write a radio play The Big House (1956); prior to this he had written two plays for Irish radio: Moving Out and A Garden Party.

Among the most famous works created for radio, are Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood (1954), Samuel Beckett's All That Fall (1957), Harold Pinter's A Slight Ache (1959), and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (1954). Beckett wrote a number of short radio plays in the 1950s and 1960s, and later for television; his radio play Embers was first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959 and won the RAI prize at the Prix Italia awards later that year.

Robert Bolt's writing career began with scripts for Children's Hour. A Man for All Seasons was subsequently produced on television in 1957. Then in 1960, there was a highly successful stage production in London's West End and on New York's Broadway from late 1961. In addition there have been two film versions: in 1966 starring Paul Scofield and 1988 for television, starring Charlton Heston.

While Alan Ayckbourn did not write for radio many of his stage plays were subsequently adapted for radio. Other significant adaptations included, dramatised readings of poet David Jones's In Parenthesis in 1946 and The Anathemata in 1953, for the BBC Third Programme, and novelist Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age (1955). Among contemporary novels that were dramatised were the 1964 radio adaptation of Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving (1960); there had also been a 1962 film adaption.

1960–2000: decline in the United States
After the advent of television, radio drama never recovered its popularity in the United States. Most remaining CBS and NBC radio dramas were cancelled in 1960. The last network radio dramas to originate during American radio's "Golden Age", Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, ended on September 30, 1962.

There have been some efforts at radio drama since then. In the 1960s, Dick Orkin created the popular syndicated comic adventure series Chicken Man. ABC Radio aired a daily dramatic anthology program, Theater Five, in 1964–65. Inspired by The Goon Show, "the four or five crazy guys" of the Firesign Theatre built a large following with their satirical plays on recordings exploring the dramatic possibilities inherent in stereo. A brief resurgence of production beginning in the early 1970s yielded Rod Serling's The Zero Hour for Mutual, National Public Radio's Earplay, and veteran Himan Brown's CBS Radio Mystery Theater and General Mills Radio Adventure Theater. These productions were later followed by the Sears/Mutual Radio Theater, The National Radio Theater of Chicago, NPR Playhouse, and a newly produced episode of the former 1950s series X Minus One. Works by a new generation of dramatists also emerged at this time, notably Yuri Rasovsky, Thomas Lopez of ZBS and the dramatic sketches heard on humorist Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion. Brian Daley's 1981 adaptation of the blockbuster space opera film Star Wars for NPR Playhouse was a notable success. Production costs on this serial were mitigated by the support of Lucasfilm, who sold the rights to NPR for a nominal $1 fee, and by the participation of the BBC in an international co-production deal. Star Wars was credited with generating a 40% rise in NPR's ratings and quadrupling the network's youth audience overnight. Radio adaptations of the sequels followed with The Empire Strikes Back in 1983 and Return of the Jedi in 1996.

Thanks in large part to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, public radio continued to air a smattering of audio drama until the mid-1980s. From 1986 to 2002, NPR's most consistent producer of radio drama was the idiosyncratic Joe Frank, working out of KCRW in Santa Monica. The Sci Fi Channel presented an audio drama series, Seeing Ear Theatre, on its website from 1997 to 2001. Also, the dramatic serial It's Your World aired twice daily on the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show from 1994 to 2008, continuing online through 2010.

2000–present: radio drama's "new media" revival
Radio drama remains popular in much of the world, though most material is now available through Internet download rather than heard over terrestrial or satellite radio. Stations producing radio drama often commission a large number of scripts. The relatively low cost of producing a radio play enables them to take chances with works by unknown writers. Radio can be a good training ground for beginning drama writers as the words written form a much greater part of the finished product; bad lines cannot be obscured with stagecraft.

The BBC's sole surviving radio soap is The Archers on BBC Radio 4: it is, with over 18,700 episodes to date, the world's longest-running such programme. Other radio soaps ("ongoing serials") produced by the BBC but no longer on air include:
 * Mrs Dale's Diary (1948–69)
 * Westway on the World Service (1997–2005)
 * Silver Street (2004–10) on the Asian Network

In September, 2010 Radio New Zealand began airing its first ongoing soap opera, You Me Now, which won the Best New Drama Award in the 2011 New Zealand Radio Awards.

On KDVS radio in Davis, California there are two radio theater shows, Evening Shadows, a horror/fantasy show paying tribute to classic old-time radio horror, and KDVS Radio Theater which commonly features dramas about social and political themes.

The audio drama format exists side by side with books presented on radio, read by actors or by the author. In Britain and other countries there is also quite a bit of radio comedy (both stand-up and sitcom). Together, these programs provide entertainment where television is either not wanted or would be distracting (such as while driving or operating machinery). Selected Shorts, a long-running NPR program broadcast in front of a live audience at Symphony Space in New York, originated the driveway moment for over 300,000 people listeners each week during readings of contemporary and classic short stories by well-known professional actors.

The lack of visuals also enable fantastical settings and effects to be used in radio plays where the cost would be prohibitive for movies or television. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was first produced as radio drama, and was not adapted for television until much later, when its popularity would ensure an appropriate return for the high cost of the futuristic setting.

On occasion television series can be revived as radio series. For example, a long-running but no longer popular television series can be continued as a radio series because the reduced production costs make it cost-effective with a much smaller audience. When an organization owns both television and radio channels, such as the BBC, the fact that no royalties have to be paid makes this even more attractive. Radio revivals can also use actors reprising their television roles even after decades as they still sound roughly the same. Series that have had this treatment include Doctor Who, Dad's Army, Thunderbirds and The Tomorrow People. In 2013 BBC Radio 4 released a radio adaptation of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, featuring a cast of well known television and film actors. Neil Gaiman has said he was excited about the radio drama adaptation as it allowed the work to be presented with a greater deal of special effects than was possible on television. In the United States, an adaptation of The Twilight Zone aired to modest success in the 2000s (decade) as a syndicated program.

Regular broadcasts of radio drama in English can be heard on the BBC's Radio 3, Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra (formerly Radio 7), on RTÉ Radio 1 in Ireland, and RNZ National in New Zealand. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced notable radio plays in Calgary and Toronto in the postwar decades, from which many actors and directors proceeded to international careers, but abolished its radio drama department in the 1970s and finally ceased production of radio dramas in 2012. BBC Radio 4 in today noted for its radio drama, broadcasting hundreds of new, one-off plays each year in such strands as The Afternoon Play, as well as serials and soap operas. Radio 4 Extra broadcasts a variety of radio plays from the BBC's vast archives and a few extended versions of Radio 4 programmes. The British commercial station Oneword, though broadcasting mostly book readings, also transmitted a number of radio plays in instalments before it closed in 2008.

In the United States, contemporary radio drama can be found on broadcasters including ACB radio, produced by the American Council of the Blind; on the Sirius XM Book Radio channel from Sirius XM Satellite Radio (previously Sonic Theater on XM); and occasionally in syndication, as with Jim French's production Imagination Theater. Several community radio stations carry weekly radio drama programs including KBOO, KFAI, WMPG, WLPP and WFHB.

A growing number of religious radio stations air daily or weekly programs usually geared to younger audiences, such as Focus on the Family's Adventures in Odyssey (1,700+ syndicated stations), or Pacific Garden Mission's Unshackled! (1,800 syndicated stations – a long-running radio drama), which is geared to adults. The networks sometime sell transcripts of their shows on cassette tapes or CDs or make the shows available for listening or downloading over the Internet. Transcription recordings of many pre-television shows have been preserved. They are collected, re-recorded onto audio CDs and/or MP3 files and traded by hobbyists today as old-time radio programs. Meanwhile, veterans such as the late Yuri Rasovsky (The National Radio Theater of Chicago) and Thomas Lopez (ZBS Foundation) have gained new listeners on cassettes, CDs and downloads. In the mid-1980s, the nonprofit L.A. Theatre Works launched its radio series recorded before live audiences. Productions have been broadcast via public radio, while also being marketed on compact discs and via download. Carl Amari's nationally syndicated radio series Hollywood 360 features four old-time radio shows during his four-hour weekly broadcasts. Amari also broadcasts old-time radio shows on The WGN Radio Theatre heard every Saturday night beginning at 10 pm on 720-WGN in Chicago.

In addition to traditional radio broadcasters, modern radio drama (also known as audio theater, or audio drama), has experienced a revival, with a growing number of independent producers who are able to build an audience through Internet distribution. While there are few academic programs in the United States that offer training in radio drama production, organizations such as the National Audio Theatre Festival teach the craft to new producers.

The digital age has also resulted in recording styles that differ from the studio recordings of radio drama's Golden Age. Not from Space (2003) on XM Satellite Radio was the first national radio play recorded exclusively through the Internet in which the voice actors were all in separate locations. Other producers use portable recording equipment to record actors on location rather than in studios.

Podcasts are a growing distribution format for independent radio drama producers. Podcasts provides an alternative to mainstream television and radio which does not necessarily require a pitching process to be made and distributed (as these aspects of production can be learned by the creator) and which have no restrictions regarding programme length or content.

Australia
In Australia, as in most other developed countries, from the early years of the medium almost every radio network and station featured drama, serials, and soap operas as staples of their programming; during the so-called "Golden Years" of radio these were hugely popular. Many Australian serials and "soapies" were copies of American originals (e.g., the popular soap Portia Faces Life or the adventure series Superman, which featured future Australian TV star Leonard Teale in the title role), although these were typically locally produced and performed live to air, since the technology of the time did not permit high-quality pre-recording or duplication of programs for import or export.

In this period radio drama, serials and soap operas provided a fertile training ground and a steady source of employment for many actors, and this was particularly important because at this time the Australian theatre scene was in its infancy and opportunities were very limited. Many who trained in this medium (such as Peter Finch) subsequently became prominent both in Australia and overseas.

It has been noted that the producers of the popular 1960s Gerry Anderson TV series Thunderbirds were greatly impressed by the versatility of UK-based Australian actor Ray Barrett, who voiced many roles in Anderson's TV productions. Thanks to his early experience on Australian live radio (where he often played English and American roles), Barrett was considered better than his English counterparts at providing a convincing Mid-Atlantic English ("transatlantic") accent, and he could perform a wide range of character voices; he also impressed the Anderson team with his ability to quickly and easily switch from one voice/accent to another without the sound engineers' having to stop the recording.

The effect of the introduction of television there in the late 1950s had the same devastating effects as it did in the US and many other markets, and by the early 1960s Australian commercial radio had totally abandoned radio drama and related programming (including comedy, soapies, and variety) in favour of music-based formats (such as Top 40) or talk radio ("talkback"), and the once-flourishing Australia radio production industry vanished within a few years. One of the few companies to survive was the Melbourne-based Crawford Productions, which was able to make the successful transition into TV production.

Despite the complete abandonment of drama and related programming by the commercial radio sector, the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) maintained a long history of producing radio drama. One of its most famous and popular series was the daily 15-minute afternoon soap opera Blue Hills, which was written for its entire production history by dramatist Gwen Meredith. It featured many well-known Australian actresses and actors, ran continuously for 27 years, from 28 February 1949 to 30 September 1976, with a total of 5,795 episodes broadcast, and was at one time the world's longest-running radio serial. It was preceded by an earlier Meredith serial The Lawsons, which featured many of the same themes and characters and itself ran for 1299 episodes.

In the 1960s and later, the ABC continued to produce many original Australian radio dramas as well as works adapted from other media. In recent years original radio dramas and adapted works were commissioned from local dramatists and produced for the ABC's Radio National network program Airplay, which ran from the late 1990s until early 2013. In late 2012 ABC management imposed budget cuts and axed a number of long-running arts programs, thereby ending the national broadcaster's decades-long history of producing radio drama (as well as its equally long history of providing daily serialised book readings).

Cyprus
Since around the early sixties the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (RIK) features radio plays in the Cypriot Greek dialect. They are called Cypriot (radio drama) sketches and they are mainly about Cyprus's rural life, traditions and customs, its history and its culture. The works are written by established writers, but also from new writers through the Writing Contest of Cypriot Sketches issued annually by CyBC (RIK)

Germany
The first German radio drama was produced in 1923. Because of the external circumstances in postwar Germany in which most of the theaters were destroyed, radio drama boomed. Between 1945 and 1960 there were more than 500 radio plays every year. The German word for radio drama or audio play is Hörspiel. Today Germany is a major market for radio plays worldwide. In particular, audio plays on CD are very popular. A popular audio play serial of Germany and of the world is ''Die drei ??? (Three Investigators).

Berlin's Prix Europa includes a Radio Fiction category.

India
Vividh Bharati, a service of All India Radio, has a long running Hindi radio-drama program: Hawa Mahal.

Republic of Ireland
RTÉ Radio Drama is one of the oldest audio theatre departments in the radio world.

Japan
Radio dramas began in Japan in 1925, and enjoyed a great level of popularity after the hit of Tankou no Naka. This resulted in the NHK hiring famous writers to write radio drama scripts for 500 yen, which in 1930 was equivalent to 1 million yen in the present day.

Due to voice acting in Japan having its own distinct culture, audio dramas continue to be popular in Japan, where they are now primarily released on disc as "drama CDs" (ドラマCD). They are also referred to in Japanese as "voice dramas" (ボイスドラマ). Many such audio dramas are based on anime, manga, novels and video games, but there are also many that are completely original. Though most drama CDs are commercial products made by corporate entities, there has been a growing number of doujin audio dramas in recent years due to it being easier for hobbyists to obtain the equipment required to make recordings, and the Internet making distribution easier.

Norway
Radioteatret (Radio drama in Norway) has existed since 1926.

Poland
In Poland, radio dramas are sometimes called "the theater of the imagination" (teatr wyobraźni). The first Polish radio drama, Warszawianka based on Stanisław Wyspiański's play, was produced in 1925 while the first radio drama written for radio was produced in 1929. Polish Radio has been successfully producing radio dramas since then – between 1925 and September 1939, over 2,500 were made. In 1956, Polish Radio started broadcasting Matysiakowie, which is currently one of the longest-running radio plays in the world. Audio plays based on literature are also popular in Poland, this is how the sound adaptations of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth or Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead were created. Since 1988, the Polish Radio Theater has awarded the Wielki Splendor awards to actors and authors of radio dramas.

Romania
Radio theatre (Teatru Radiofonic ) has a long tradition in Romania. The first piece was played in 1929. The 7000+ piece repertoire includes radio adaptations of both Romanian and international books/plays across many genres interpreted by the greatest Romanian actors of the time.

South Africa
Radio broadcasting began in South Africa in 1924 and remained the dominant broadcast medium in the country until the late 1970s. Created by an act of Parliament in 1936, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) aired radio dramas along with news and British content in Afrikaans and English. Radio drama became more prominent with the launch of Springbok Radio, an English and Afrikaans commercial station operated by SABC between May 1950 and December 1985.

The SABC launched Radio Bantu in 1960s, broadcasting first in isiZulu and soon followed by other African languages, intended to serve as the apartheid state's propaganda channel. However, radio drama broadcast in African languages contributed to subverting the apartheid government by shaping culture and identity while challenging apartheid ideologies. Radio dramas were not subjected to the same level of apartheid editorial scrutiny, and therefore provided a forum for ideas without openly addressing politics. Radio drama evolved with changing socio-economic contexts. Female characters began to feature more prominently.

Radio drama continues to be a mainstay of South African radio. SABC's drama studios in each of the country's 9 provinces produce dramas for all 19 SABC radio stations. Recognizing radio's reach, some private sector entities have also invested in radio drama, such as Standard Bank's 5-minute Iketsetse Zenzele radio drama which aired for 8 years to raise awareness about financial literacy, fraud, and cybercrimes. Non-governmental organizations widely use radio drama as part of campaigns for health awareness and rights activism, such as the long-running Soul Buddyz series focused on adolescent health, Masiphephe Radio Drama addressing gender-based violence, and the Plague in the Time of King Kapital and Queen Corona focused on Covid-19 awareness.

Thailand
A low power radio station "M.C.O.K. Radio 2" (formally Pira FM) introduces a new programming block called M.C.O.K. Television – aims to replace the regular evening music programmes. The programming block is composed of British radio dramas and an Audio-Described version of British TV programmes such as Doctor Who, EastEnders and Horrible Histories.

Since 1 November 2021, Radio dramas were scrapped and replaced with more (Audio-Described) programmes – All At Sea, Dad's Army, Mrs. Brown's Boys and The Outlaw. The radio station broadcasts on 87.2 MHz every evening / late night. Due to the nature of low-power VHF propagation, the coverage is very limited, the radio station can be heard only in Lat Luang (Bangkok / Samut Prakan area). It is the first radio station in Thailand to broadcast both English radio / TV programmes on FM.

Mainland China
Before 2010, radio dramas on mainland China were usually performed by organisations associated with the Chinese Communist Party, such as the Central Radio Drama Troupe, which was founded in 1954. Their content was also deeply related to the historical events of the corresponding period and they largely served as propaganda. 10,000 Pieces of Clipboards, produced by the China National Radio in 1950 to commemorate the Feb 7 General Strike , is considered to be the first radio drama after the CCP established the regime in mainland China. Similar radio dramas include The North Korean Zoya - Kim Yu Ji and Thanks to Stalin.

With the development of the Internet and the spread of Japanese ACG culture, ACG fans on mainland China began to independently produce radio dramas at around 2010. These radio dramas are usually not broadcast on radio stations, but uploaded to online audio platforms like MissEvan.

BBC sources

 * The BBC Story – The Written Archives:
 * Radio Plays & Radio Drama webpage (England):
 * British Radio Drama – A Cultural Case History by Tim Crook:

title: Radio drama


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Pantone

Pantone LLC (stylized as PANTONE) is an American limited liability company headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, and best known for its Pantone Matching System (PMS), a proprietary color space used in a variety of industries, notably graphic design, fashion design, product design, printing, and manufacturing and supporting the management of color from design to production, in physical and digital formats, among coated and uncoated materials, cotton, polyester, nylon and plastics.

X-Rite, a supplier of color measurement instruments and software, purchased Pantone for US$180 million in October 2007, and was itself acquired by Danaher Corporation in 2012. At the end of September 2023, Danaher spun-off its Environmental and Applied Solutions segment as Veralto Corporation.

History
Pantone began in New Jersey in the 1950s as the commercial printing company of brothers Mervin and Jesse Levine, M & J Levine Advertising. In 1956, its founders, both advertising executives, hired recent Hofstra University graduate Lawrence Herbert as a part-time employee. Herbert used his chemistry knowledge to systematize and simplify the company's stock of pigments and production of colored inks; by 1962, Herbert was running the ink and printing division at a profit, while the commercial-display division was US$50,000 in debt; he subsequently purchased the company's technological assets from the Levine Brothers for US$50,000 and renamed them "Pantone".

The company's primary products include the Pantone Guides, which consist of a large number of small (approximately 6×2 inches or 15×5 cm) thin cardboard or plastic sheets, printed on one side with a series of related color swatches and then bound into a small "fan deck". For instance, a particular "page" might contain several yellows of varying tints.

The idea behind the PMS is to allow designers to "color match" specific colors when a design enters production stage, regardless of the equipment used to produce the color. This system has been widely adopted by graphic designers and reproduction and printing houses. Pantone recommends that PMS Color Guides be purchased annually, as their inks become yellowish over time. Color variance also occurs within editions based on the paper stock used (coated, matte or uncoated), while interedition color variance occurs when there are changes to the specific paper stock used.

Falling-out with Adobe
In 2022, a dispute between Pantone and Adobe resulted in the removal of Pantone color coordinates from Photoshop and Adobe's other design software, causing colors in graphic artists' digital documents to be replaced with black unless artists paid Pantone a separate $15 monthly subscription fee. Artists accused Pantone and Adobe of holding their work hostage. UK artist Stuart Semple responded by releasing FREETONE, a freeware clone of Pantone's color lists for use with Adobe software.

Pantone Color Matching System
The Pantone Color Matching System is largely a standardized color reproduction system; as of 2019 it has 2161 colors. By standardizing the colors, different manufacturers in different locations can all refer to the Pantone system to make sure colors match without direct contact with one another.

One such use is standardizing colors in the CMYK process. The CMYK process is a method of printing color by using four inks—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. A majority of the world's printed material is produced using the CMYK process, and there is a special subset of Pantone colors that can be reproduced using CMYK. Those that are possible to simulate through the CMYK process are labeled as such within the company's guides.

However, about 30% of the Pantone system's 1114 spot colors (as of year 2000) cannot be simulated with CMYK but with 13 base pigments (14 including black) mixed in specified amounts, called base colors. Those 1114 colors included 387 colors with numbers 100 to 487 from 1975 and some lighter colors from 600 to 732 in 1991. The original four-digit colors introduced in 1987 were remapped into three digits.

The Pantone system also later allowed for many special colors to be produced, such as metallics, fluorescents (neons) and pastels. There are 56 fluorescents from 801 to 814 (first 7 here are base colors, so called Dayglo) and from 901 to 942. Packaging metallics (previously premium metallics) are placed from 10101 to 10454 (54 of those added later, 354 altogether, 2 base colors Silver 10077 and Rose Gold 10412), while normal metallics are placed from 871 to 877 (first 7 here are base colors) and from 8001 to 8965. Pastels are from 9140 to 9163 with base colors being 0131, 0331, 0521, 0631, 0821, 0921 and 0961. While most of the Pantone system colors are beyond the printed CMYK gamut, it was only in 2001 that Pantone began providing translations of their existing system with screen-based colors. Screen-based colors use the RGB color model—red, green, blue—system to create various colors. A lot of colors are outside sRGB. The (discontinued) Goe system has RGB, LAB, SPD values with each color and has 10 base colors while only 4 of those new: Bright Red, Pink, Medium Purple and Dark Blue. Other 6 were in the system before: Yellow 012, Orange 021, Rubine Red, Green, Process Blue and Black that in Goe were named Medium Yellow, Bright Orange, Strong Red, Bright Green, Medium Blue and Neutral Black. (PMS has 8 more basic base colors, some not monopigmented: Yellow 010, Red 032, Warm Red, Rhodamine Red, Purple, Violet, Reflex Blue, Blue 072.)

Pantone colors are described by their allocated number (typically referred to as, for example, "PMS 130"). PMS colors are almost always used in branding and have even found their way into government legislation and military standards (to describe the colors of flags and seals). In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a petition (reference PE512) to refer to the blue in the Scottish flag as "Pantone 300". Countries such as Canada and South Korea and organizations such as the FIA have also chosen to refer to specific Pantone colors to use when producing flags. US states including Texas have set legislated PMS colors of their flags.

Pantone Goe System
On September 5, 2007, Pantone introduced the Goe System. Goe consisted of 2058 new colors in a new matching and numbering system. In addition to the standard swatch books (now called the GoeGuide), the new system also included adhesive-backed GoeSticks, interactive software, tools, and an online community where users were able to share color swatches and information.

The Goe system was streamlined to use fewer base colors (ten, plus clear coating for reflections, only 4 base colors were new) and accommodate many technical challenges in reproducing colors on a press.

The Pantone Goe system was discontinued in November 2013, but 4 new base colors were added into PMS and some of new colors too, though those 4 base colors are harder to purchase.

Other products
In mid-2006 Pantone, partnering with Vermont-based Fine Paints of Europe, introduced a new line of interior and exterior paints. The color palette uses Pantone's color research and trending and has more than 3,000 colors.

In November 2015, Pantone partnered with Redland London to create a collection of bags inspired from Pantone's authority on color.

Pantone also produced Hexachrome, a patented six-color printing system. In addition to custom CMYK inks, Hexachrome added orange and green inks to expand the color gamut, for better color reproduction. It was therefore also known as a CMYKOG process. Hexachrome was discontinued by Pantone in 2008 when Adobe Systems stopped supporting their HexWare plugin software. In 2015 7-color printing system was developed, adding Violet in CMYKOGV, that can cover 90% of 1114 spot colors, while CMYK only about 60%. 1729 new colors were added, marked XGC (extended gamut coated), some colors do not have a number, like Process Blue XGC or Purple XGC. Base colors of OGV were new mono-pigment inks, pigments PO34, PG7 and PV23 were used respectively with 58°, 180° and 311° hue angles.

Pantone Color Manager allows for users of the Adobe Creative Suite and Creative Cloud as well as other software to import the most up to date information inclusive of L*a*b* numbers as well as CMYK and sRGB representations of all the various palettes (including chromatic adaptation under default D50 or D65 with 2 degree or 10 degree observer or even any ICC profile). L*a*b* numbers allow for the most accurate representation of color in a device-independent manner, but ideally X-rite InkFormulation is needed to emulate substrates and all 14 base colors of main Pantone system or 7 colors of CMYKOGV. Support is being phased out in favour of Pantone Connect plugin from Adobe Exchange of Creative Cloud. Adobe Illustrator removed five acb files (Adobe Color Books) of Pantone+ colors in 2023 when Pantone+ was deprecated by Pantone.

Color of the Year
Since 2000, the Pantone Color Institute has declared a particular color "Color of the Year". Twice a year the company hosts, in a European capital, a secret meeting of representatives from various nations' color standards groups. After two days of presentations and debate, they choose a color for the following year; for example, the color for summer 2013 was chosen in London in the spring of 2012.

The selected color purportedly connects with the zeitgeist; for example, the press release declaring Honeysuckle the color of 2011 said "In times of stress, we need something to lift our spirits. Honeysuckle is a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going – perfect to ward off the blues." The results of the meeting are published in Pantone View, which fashion designers, florists, and many other consumer-oriented companies purchase to help guide their designs and planning for future products. In 2016 and 2021, Pantone chose two colors for Color of the Year.

In 2012, the color of the year, Tangerine Tango, was used to create a makeup line, in partnership with Sephora. The product line, named Sephora + Pantone Universe collection, features Tangerine Tango–embellished false lashes, nail lacquers, cream, glitters, and high-pigment lip glosses. 2013 Emerald color was reported to be out of sRGB gamut. Also new Very Peri color of 2022 is present in TCX (dyed cotton reference) and TPG (Textile Paper – "Green" ) form, here TCX for sRGB hex values are mentioned.

The person behind Pantone's Color of the Year, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute Leatrice Eiseman, explained in an interview how 2014's Color of the Year, Radiant Orchid, was chosen: "I look for ascending color trends, colors that are being used in broader ways and broader context than before ... In this case, Radiant Orchid descends from the purple family, which is kind of a magical color that denotes creativity and innovation. Purple is just that kind of a complex, interesting, attracting kind of color ... [The] back-story to purple is that it inspires confidence in your creativity, and we're living in a world where that kind of creative innovation is greatly admired. In the world of color, purple is an attention-getter, and it has a meaning. It speaks to people, and we felt that it was time for the purple family to be celebrated.  That's why we chose the particular shade called Radiant Orchid."

Pantone has said that color "has always been an integral part of how a culture expresses the attitudes and emotions of the times."

Intellectual property
Pantone asserts that their lists of color numbers and pigment values are the intellectual property of Pantone and free use of the list is not allowed. This is frequently held as a reason Pantone colors cannot be supported in open-source software and are not often found in low-cost proprietary software. Pantone has been accused of "being intentionally unclear" about its exact legal claims, but it is acknowledged that "the simplest claim would be trademark misappropriation or dilution towards someone who produced a color palette marketed as compatible with Pantone's".

By contrast, intellectual property scholar Aaron Perzanowski claims that Pantone has no intellectual property rights over individual colors or color libraries.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Pantone


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Montesquieu

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher.

He is the principal source of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon. His anonymously published The Spirit of Law (1748), which was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States in drafting the U.S. Constitution.

Biography
Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 km south of Bordeaux. His father, Jacques de Secondat (1654–1713), was a soldier with a long noble ancestry, including descent from Richard de la Pole, Yorkist claimant to the English crown. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel (1665–1696), who died when Charles was seven, was an heiress who brought the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family. His family was of Huguenot origin. After the death of his mother he was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school for the children of French nobility, where he remained from 1700 to 1711. His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu. He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parlement in 1714. He showed preference for Protestantism and in 1715 he married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue, who eventually bore him three children. The Baron died in 1716, leaving him his fortune as well as his title, and the office of président à mortier in the Bordeaux Parlement, a post that he would hold for twelve years.

Montesquieu's early life was a time of significant governmental change. England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), and joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France, the long-reigning Louis XIV died in 1715 and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV. These national transformations had a great impact on Montesquieu; he would refer to them repeatedly in his work.

Montesquieu eventually withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing. He achieved literary success with the publication of his 1721 Persian Letters (Lettres persanes), a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two Persian visitors to Paris, cleverly criticizing absurdities of contemporary French society. The work was an instant classic and accordingly was immediately pirated. In 1722, he went to Paris and entered social circles with the help of friends including the Duke of Berwick whom he had known when Berwick was military governor at Bordeaux. He also acquainted himself with the English politician Viscount Bolingbroke, some of whose political views were later reflected in Montesquieu's analysis of the English constitution. In 1726 he sold his office, bored with the parlement and turning more toward Paris. In time, despite some impediments he was elected to the Académie Française in January 1728.

In April 1728, with Berwick's nephew Lord Waldegrave as his traveling companion, Montesquieu embarked on a grand tour of Europe, during which he kept a journal. His travels included Austria and Hungary and a year in Italy. He went to England at the end of October 1729, in the company of Lord Chesterfield, where he was initiated into Freemasonry at the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster. He remained in England until the spring of 1731, when he returned to La Brède. Outwardly he seemed to be settling down as a squire: he altered his park in the English fashion, made inquiries into his own genealogy, and asserted his seignorial rights. But he was continuously at work in his study, and his reflections on geography, laws and customs during his travels became the primary sources for his major works on political philosophy at this time. He next published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), among his three best known books. He was to publish The Spirit of Law in 1748, quickly translated into English. It quickly rose to influence political thought profoundly in Europe and America. In France, the book met with an enthusiastic reception by many but was denounced by the Sorbonne and, in 1751, by the Catholic Church (Index of Prohibited Books). It received the highest praise from much of the rest of Europe, especially Britain. Montesquieu was also highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty. According to a survey of late eighteenth-century works by political scientist Donald Lutz, Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible. Following the American Revolution, his work remained a powerful influence on many of the American founders, most notably James Madison of Virginia, the "Father of the Constitution". Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers.

Montesquieu was troubled by a cataract and feared going blind. At the end of 1754 he visited Paris and was soon taken ill, and died from a fever on 10 February 1755. He was buried in the Église Saint-Sulpice, Paris.

Philosophy of history
Montesquieu's philosophy of history minimized the role of individual persons and events. He expounded the view in Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, that each historical event was driven by a principal movement:

"It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents."

In discussing the transition from the Republic to the Empire, he suggested that if Caesar and Pompey had not worked to usurp the government of the Republic, other men would have risen in their place. The cause was not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey, but the ambition of man.

Political views
Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, who include Herodotus and Tacitus, of anthropology—as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies. Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthropology". According to social anthropologist D. F. Pocock, Montesquieu's The Spirit of Law was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions." "Émile Durkheim," notes David W. Carrithers, "even went so far as to suggest that it was precisely this realization of the interrelatedness of social phenomena that brought social science into being." Montesquieu's political anthropology gave rise to his influential view that forms of government are supported by governing principles: virtue for republics, honor for monarchies, and fear for despotisms. American founders studied Montesquieu's views on how the English achieved liberty by separating executive, legislative, and judicial powers, and when Catherine the Great wrote her Nakaz (Instruction) for the Legislative Assembly she had created to clarify the existing Russian law code, she avowed borrowing heavily from Montesquieu's Spirit of Law, although she discarded or altered portions that did not support Russia's absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.

Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes (or trias politica, a term he coined): the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons. Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers were the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two, either singly or in combination. This was a radical idea because it does not follow the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the people at large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last vestige of a feudalistic structure.

The theory of the separation of powers largely derives from The Spirit of Law:

"In every state there are three kinds of power: the legislative authority, the executive authority for things that stem from the law of nations, and the executive authority for those that stem from civil law.

By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already enacted. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions. By the third, he punishes criminals, or determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power, and the other, simply, the executive power of the state."

Montesquieu argues that each power should only exercise its own functions; he is quite explicit here:

"When in the same person or in the same body of magistracy the legislative authority is combined with the executive authority, there is no freedom, because one can fear lest the same monarch or the same senate make tyrannical laws in order to carry them out tyrannically. Again there is no freedom if the authority to judge is not separated from the legislative and executive authorities. If it were combined with the legislative authority, power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were combined with the executive authority, the judge could have the strength of an oppressor. All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principals, or of nobles, or of the people, exercised these three powers: that of making laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging crimes or disputes between individuals."

If the legislative branch appoints the executive and judicial powers, as Montesquieu indicated, there will be no separation or division of its powers, since the power to appoint carries with it the power to revoke.

"The executive authority must be in the hands of a monarch, for this part of the government, which almost always requires immediate action, is better administrated by one than by several, whereas that which depends on the legislative authority is often better organized by several than by one person alone.

If there were no monarch, and the executive authority were entrusted to a certain number of persons chosen from the legislative body, that would be the end of freedom, because the two authorities would be combined, the same persons sometimes having, and always in a position to have, a role in both."

Montesquieu identifies three main forms of government, each supported by a social "principle": monarchies (free governments headed by a hereditary figure, e.g. king, queen, emperor), which rely on the principle of honor; republics (free governments headed by popularly elected leaders), which rely on the principle of virtue; and despotisms (unfree), headed by despots which rely on fear. The free governments are dependent on constitutional arrangements that establish checks and balances. Montesquieu devotes one chapter of The Spirit of Law to a discussion of how the England's constitution sustained liberty (XI, 6), and another to the realities of English politics (XIX, 27). As for France, the intermediate powers (including the nobility) the nobility and the parlements had been weakened by Louis XIV, and welcomed the strengthening of parlementary power in 1715.

Montesquieu advocated reform of slavery in The Spirit of Law, specifically arguing that slavery was inherently wrong because all humans are born equal, but that it could perhaps be justified within the context of climates with intense heat, wherein laborers would feel less inclined to work voluntarily. As part of his advocacy he presented a satirical hypothetical list of arguments for slavery. In the hypothetical list, he'd ironically list pro-slavery arguments without further comment, including an argument stating that sugar would become too expensive without the free labor of slaves.

While addressing French readers of his General Theory, John Maynard Keynes described Montesquieu as "the real French equivalent of Adam Smith, the greatest of your economists, head and shoulders above the physiocrats in penetration, clear-headedness and good sense (which are the qualities an economist should have)."

Meteorological climate theory
Another example of Montesquieu's anthropological thinking, outlined in The Spirit of Law and hinted at in Persian Letters, is his meteorological climate theory, which holds that climate may substantially influence the nature of man and his society, a theory also promoted by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. By placing an emphasis on environmental influences as a material condition of life, Montesquieu prefigured modern anthropology's concern with the impact of material conditions, such as available energy sources, organized production systems, and technologies, on the growth of complex socio-cultural systems.

He goes so far as to assert that certain climates are more favorable than others, the temperate climate of France being ideal. His view is that people living in very warm countries are "too hot-tempered", while those in northern countries are "icy" or "stiff". The climate of middle Europe is therefore optimal. On this point, Montesquieu may well have been influenced by a similar pronouncement in The Histories of Herodotus, where he makes a distinction between the "ideal" temperate climate of Greece as opposed to the overly cold climate of Scythia and the overly warm climate of Egypt. This was a common belief at the time, and can also be found within the medical writings of Herodotus' times, including the "On Airs, Waters, Places" of the Hippocratic corpus. One can find a similar statement in Germania by Tacitus, one of Montesquieu's favorite authors.

Philip M. Parker, in his book Physioeconomics (MIT Press, 2000), endorses Montesquieu's theory and argues that much of the economic variation between countries is explained by the physiological effect of different climates.

From a sociological perspective, Louis Althusser, in his analysis of Montesquieu's revolution in method, alluded to the seminal character of anthropology's inclusion of material factors, such as climate, in the explanation of social dynamics and political forms. Examples of certain climatic and geographical factors giving rise to increasingly complex social systems include those that were conducive to the rise of agriculture and the domestication of wild plants and animals.

Memorialization
Between 1981 and 1994, a depiction of Monetesquieu appeared on the 200 French franc note.

Since 1989, the annual Montesquieu prize has been awarded by the French Association of Historians of Political Ideas for the best French-language thesis on the history of political thought.

On Europe Day 2007, the Montesquieu Institute opened in The Hague, the Netherlands, with a mission to advance research and education on the parliamentary history and political culture of the European Union and its member states.

The Montesquieu tower in Luxembourg was completed in 2008 as an addition to the headquarters of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The building houses many of the institution's translation services. Until 2019, it stood, with its sister tower, Comenius, as the tallest building in the country.

Chronology and principal works
1689   18 January:  Birth of Charles Louis de Secondat at La Brède, son of Jacques de Secondat and Marie Françoise de Pesnel. 1700–1705: Schooling along with two cousins at the Oratorian school in Juilly, near Paris, where he received a classical education. 1705–1708: Study of law in Bordeaux 1709–1713: Residence in Paris.

1713:  Death of his father; Montesquieu returns to Bordeaux to assume role as head of family. 1714:  Appointed counselor in the parliament of Bordeaux. 1715:  Marriage to Jeanne de Lartigue, a Calvinist who brings him a substantial dowry. Spicilège (Gleanings, 1715 onward)

1716:   Birth of a son, Jean-Baptiste; death of his uncle, from whom he inherits the title Baron de Montesquieu, and the office of judge (président à mortier) in the parlement. Reception as member of the royal academy in Bordeaux.

1718–1721: Memoirs and discourses at the Academy of Bordeaux (1718–1721): including discourses on such topics as echoes, the renal glands, the weight of bodies, the transparency of bodies, and on natural history, collected with introductions and critical apparatus in volumes 8 and 9 of Œuvres complètes, Oxford and Naples, 2003–2006. 1721:  Persian Letters, translated into English the following year by John Ozell.

1725:  Treatise on Duties; The Temple of Gnidus, a prose poem; Reflections on the Character of Certain Princes (?); Discourse on Equity; first mention of the Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates.

1726:  Sale of the usufruct of Montesquieu's parlementary office. 1727: Montesquieu begins a compilation called Mes Pensées (My Thoughts) which he will draw on in various writings for the rest of his life.

1728:  Election to the Académie française.

1728 (April)–1729 (Oct.): Travels in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, and Holland (composition of his Travels).

1729 (Nov.) –1731 (spring): Visit to England; composition of Notes on England. 1731–1733: Residence at La Brède. 1734":  Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and on their decline; Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe; Reflections on the character of certain princes. Montesquieu rents an apartment in the Rue Saint Dominique (faubourg Saint Germain) which he will occupy until his death. 1735–1739:  Histoire véritable (True Story); revision of the chapter entitled "On the English Constitution" (The Spirit of Law, XI, 6).

1739–1748: Composition of The Spirit of Law.

1742: First version of Arsace and Ismania, a novel.

1745:  Publication of Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates.

1748 (July): Second edition of Considerations on the Romans; (August) Montesquieu definitively sells his office of président which his son declines to assume; (Nov.) Publication in Geneva of The Spirit of Law.

1749–1751: Battle of The Spirit of Law: (1750) Defense of The Spirit of Law; the Sorbonne (theology faculty) cites 13 propositions in it that should be condemned; (1751) condemnation by the Roman Index.

1750: The Spirit of Laws, English translation of L'Esprit des lois by Thomas Nugent.

1751–1754: Prepares corrections and some additions for Persian Letters, The Spirit of Law, etc.

1755:   10 February: Death in Paris.

1757: Essai sur le goût (Essay on Taste) published in the Encyclopédie.

1758:  Posthumous, partially revised edition of his works overseen by his son.

1998– : critical edition of Montesquieu's works published by the Société Montesquieu. As of June 2023, all but five of the planned 22 volumes have appeared.

Works available in English translation
The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu, trans. Thomas Nugent, London: T. Evans and W. Davis, 1777, 4 vols. Includes The Spirit of Law, Considerations on […] the Romans, Persian Letters, letters, Essay on Taste, The Temple of Gnidus, Defense of the Spirit of Law. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/montesquieu-complete-works-4-vols-1777

The Works of M. de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, 3 vols., London: Vernor and Hood, 1800. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102110886

The Temple of Gnidus with Cephisa and Cupid and Arsaces and Ismenia, trans. John Sayer, London: Vizetelly [1889]. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100769287

The Personal and the Political: three fables by Montesquieu (The Temple of Cnidus, Lysimachus, and Dialogue de Sylla et d’Eucrate), bilingual edition by William B. Allen, Lanham: University Press of America, 2008.

Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, fourth edition, Glasgow: Robert Urie, 1758. https://archive.org/details/reflectionsoncau00mont/page/n6

Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Oxford: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1825. https://archive.org/details/reflectionsonca00montgoog/page/n7

Considerations on the causes of the grandeur and decadence of the Romans, trans. Jehu Baker, New York: D. Appleton, 1882. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100769779; https://archive.org/stream/cu31924028288722#page/n5/mode/2up

Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal, New York: Free Press, 1965; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.

Persian Letters (Lettres persanes). There are several English translations, only two of which use the same reference system as the OC edition (based on the original edition of 1721): trans. Margaret Mauldon, Oxford World Classics, 2008, and trans. Philip Stewart, 2020, open access: https://montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?article3494.

The Spirit of Laws, English translation by Thomas Nugent. There were numerous editions (and variations) of this translation published over the next two-plus centuries.

The Spirit of Laws : a compendium of the first English edition, edited, with introduction, notes, and appendixes, by David Wallace Carrithers, with An essay on causes affecting minds and characters, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

The Spirit of Law, trans. Philip Stewart, 2018. Open access: http://montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/spip.php?rubrique186

My Thoughts (Mes pensées), trans. Henry C. Clark, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012. On line: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/montesquieu-my-thoughts-mes-pensees-1720-2012

Discourses, Dissertations, and Dialogues on Science, Politics, and Religion, trans. David Carrithers and Philip Stewart, introduction and notes by David Carrithers, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

General studies in English
Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau, Forerunners of Sociology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.

David W. Carrithers and Patrick Coleman (eds.), Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity, (SVEC 2002:09), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Rebecca E. Kingston, ed., Montesquieu and His Legacy, Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Domenico Felice, Montesquieu: an Introduction, Mila-Udine: Mimesis International, 2018.

Keegan Callanan and Sharon Ruth Krause (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

The Spirit of Law
Sheila Mason, Montesquieu’s Idea of Justice, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975.

Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Stephen J. Rosow, "Commerce, Power and Justice: Montesquieu on international politics", Review of Politics 46, no. 3 (July 1984): 346–366.

Anne M. Cohler, Montesquieu’s Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism, Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Thomas L. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: a commentary on "The Spirit of the Laws", Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

David W. Carrithers, "Montesquieu’s philosophy of punishment", History of Political Thought 19 (1998), p. 213-240.

David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe, eds., Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: essays on "The Spirit of Laws", Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.

Robert Howse, "Montesquieu on Commerce, War, and Peace", Brookings Journal of International Law 31, no. 3 (2006): 693–708.

Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Andrea Radasanu, "Montesquieu on Moderation, Monarchy and Reform", History of Political Thought 31, no. 2 (2010): 283–307.

Rolando Minuti, Studies on Montesquieu: mapping political diversity, Cham (Switzerland): Springer, 2018. (Translation by Julia Weiss of Una geografia politica della diversità: studi su Montesquieu, Naples, Liguori, 2015.)

Andrew Scott Bibby, Montesquieu’s Political Economy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Joshua Bandoch, The Politics of Place: Montesquieu, particularism, and the pursuit of liberty, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2017.

Vickie B. Sullivan, Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe: an interpretation of "The Spirit of the laws", University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Keegan Callanan, Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Sharon R. Krause, The Rule of Law in Montesquieu, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Vicki V. Sullivan, "Montesquieu on Slavery" in K. Callanan, The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu, p. 182-197.

title: Montesquieu


text:
Younger Dryas

The Younger Dryas (YD) was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). It is primarily known for the sudden or "abrupt" cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Atlantic Ocean cooled and annual air temperatures decreased by ~3 C-change over North America, 2-6 C-change in Europe and up to 10 C-change in Greenland, in a few decades. Cooling in Greenland was particularly rapid, taking place over just 3 years or less. At the same time, the Southern Hemisphere had experienced warming. This period ended as rapidly as it began, with dramatic warming over ~50 years, which had transitioned the Earth from the glacial Pleistocene epoch into the current Holocene.

The Younger Dryas onset was not fully synchronized; in the tropics, the cooling was spread out over several centuries, and the same was true of the early-Holocene warming. Even in the Northern Hemisphere, temperature change was highly seasonal, with much colder winters, cooler springs, yet no change or even slight warming during the summer. Substantial changes in precipitation have also taken place, with cooler areas experiencing substantially lower rainfall, while warmer areas received more of it. Northern Hemisphere growing season length had declined. Land ice cover experienced little net change, but sea ice extent had increased, contributing to ice–albedo feedback. This increase in albedo was the main reason for net global cooling of 0.6 C-change.

During the preceding period, the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial, rapid warming in the Northern Hemisphere was offset by the equivalent cooling in the Southern Hemipshere. This "polar seesaw" pattern is consistent with changes in thermohaline circulation (particularly the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation or AMOC), which greatly affects how much heat is able to go from the Southern Hemisphere to the North. Southern Hemisphere cools and the Northern Hemisphere warms when the AMOC is strong, and the opposite happens when it is weak. The scientific consensus is that severe AMOC weakening explains the climatic effects of the Younger Dryas. It also explains why the Holocene warming had proceeded so rapidly once the AMOC change was no longer counteracting the increase in carbon dioxide levels.

AMOC weakening causing polar seesaw effects is also consistent with the accepted explanation for Dansgaard–Oeschger events, with YD likely to have been the last and the strongest of these events. However, is some debate over what caused the AMOC to become so weak in the first place. The hypothesis historically most supported by scientists was the interruption from an influx of fresh, cold water from North America's Lake Agassiz into the Atlantic Ocean. While there is evidence of meltwater travelling via Mackenzie River, this hypothesis may be not be consistent with the lack of sea level rise during this period, so other theories have also emerged. An extraterrestrial impact into the Laurentide ice sheet (where it would have left no impact crater) was proposed as an explanation, but this hypothesis has numerous issues and no support from mainstream science. A volcanic eruption as an initial trigger for cooling and sea ice growth has been proposed more recently, and the presence of anomalously high levels of volcanism immediately preceding the onset of the Younger Dryas has been confirmed in both ice cores and cave deposits.

Etymology
The Younger Dryas is named after the alpine–tundra wildflower Dryas octopetala, because its fossils are abundant in the European (particularly Scandinavian) sediments dating to this timeframe. The two earlier geologic periods where this flower was abundant in Europe are the Oldest Dryas (approx. 18,500-14,000 BP) and Older Dryas (~14,050–13,900 BP), respectively. On the contrary, Dryas octopetala was rare during the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial. Instead, European temperatures were warm enough to support trees in Scandinavia, as seen at the Bølling and Allerød sites in Denmark.

In Ireland, the Younger Dryas has also been known as the Nahanagan Stadial, and in Great Britain it has been called the Loch Lomond Stadial. In the Greenland Summit ice core chronology, the Younger Dryas corresponds to Greenland Stadial 1 (GS-1). The preceding Allerød warm period (interstadial) is subdivided into three events: Greenland Interstadial-1c to 1a (GI-1c to GI-1a).

Climate
As with the other geologic periods, paleoclimate during Younger Dryas is reconstructed through proxy data such as traces of pollen, ice cores and layers of marine and lake sediments. Collectively, this evidence shows that significant cooling across the Northern Hemisphere began around 12,870 ± 30 years BP. It was particularly severe in Greenland, where temperatures declined by 4-10 C-change, in an abrupt fashion. Temperatures at the Greenland summit were up to 15 C-change colder than at the start of 21st century.

Strong cooling of around 2-6 C-change had also taken place in Europe. Icefields and glaciers formed in upland areas of Great Britain, while many lowland areas developed permafrost, implying a cooling of -5 C and a mean annual temperature no higher than -1 C. North America also became colder, particularly in the eastern and central areas. While the Pacific Northwest region cooled by 2-3 C-change, cooling in the western North America was generally less intense. While the Orca Basin in the Gulf of Mexico still experienced a drop in sea surface temperature of 2.4 ± 0.6°C, land areas closer to it, such as Texas, Grand Canyon area and New Mexico, ultimately didn't cool as much as the continental interior. The Southeastern United States became warmer and wetter than before. There was warming in and around the Caribbean Sea, and in West Africa.

It was once believed that the Younger Dryas cooling started at around the same time across the Northern Hemisphere. However, varve (sedimentary rock) analysis carried out in 2015 suggested that the cooling proceeded in two stages: first along latitude 56–54°N, 12,900–13,100 years ago, and then further north, 12,600–12,750 years ago. Evidence from Lake Suigetsu cores in Japan and Puerto Princesa cave complex in the Philippines shows that the onset of Younger Dryas in East Asia was delayed by several hundred years relative to the North Atlantic. Further, the cooling was uniform throughout the year, but had a distinct seasonal pattern. In most places in the Northern Hemisphere, winters became much colder than before, but springs cooled by less, while there was either no temperature change or even slight warming during the summer. An exception appears to have taken place in what is now Maine, where winter temperatures remained stable, yet summer temperatures decreased by up to 7.5 C-change.

While the Northern Hemisphere cooled, considerable warming had occurred in the Southern Hemisphere. Sea surface temperatures were warmer by 0.3-1.9 C-change, and Antarctica, South America (south of Venezuela) and New Zealand have all experienced warming. The net temperature change was a relatively modest cooling of 0.6 C-change. Temperature changes of the Younger Dryas had lasted 1,150–1,300 years. According to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the Younger Dryas ended around 11,700 years ago, although some research places it closer to 11,550 years ago.

The end of Younger Dryas was also abrupt: in previously cooled areas, warming to previous levels had taken place over 50–60 years. The tropics had experienced more gradual temperature recovery over several centuries; the exception was in the tropical Atlantic areas such as Costa Rica, where temperature change was similar to Greenland's. The Holocene warming then proceeded across the globe, following an increase in the carbon dioxide levels during the YD period (from ~210 ppm to ~275 ppm ).

Ice cover
Younger Dryas cooling was often accompanied by glacier advance and a lowering of the regional snow line, with evidence found in areas such as Scandinavia, the Swiss Alps and the Dinaric Alps in the Balkans, northern ranges of North America's Rocky Mountains,   Two Creeks Buried Forest in Wisconsin and western parts of the New York State, and in the Pacific Northwest, including the Cascade Range. The entire Laurentide ice sheet had advanced between west Lake Superior and southeast Quebec, leaving behind a layer of rock debris (moraine) dated to this period.

On the other hand, the warming of the Southern Hemisphere led to ice loss in Antarctica, South America and New Zealand. Moreover, while Greenland as a whole had cooled, glaciers had only grown in the north of the island, and they had retreated from the rest of Greenland's coasts. This was likely driven by the strengthened Irminger Current. Jabllanica mountain range in the Balkans had also experienced ice loss and glacial retreat: this was likely caused by the drop in annual precipitation, which would have otherwise frozen above and helped to maintain the glaciers. Unlike now, the glaciers were still present in northern Scotland, but they had thinned during the Younger Dryas.

The amount of water contained within glaciers directly influences global sea levels - sea level rise occurs if the glaciers retreat, and it drops if glaciers increase in size. Altogether, there appears to have been little change in sea level throughout the Younger Dryas. This is in contrast to rapid increases before and after, such as the Meltwater Pulse 1A. On the coasts, glacier advance and retreat also affects relative sea level: i.e. western Norway experienced relative sea level rise of 10 m as the Scandinavian ice sheet advanced. Notably, ice sheet advance in this area appears to have begun about 600 years before the global onset of Younger Dryas. Underwater, the deposits of methane clathrate - methane frozen into ice - remained stable throughout Younger Dryas period, including during the rapid warming as it ended.

Weather systems
As the Northern Hemisphere cooled and the Southern Hemisphere warmed, the thermal equator would have shifted to the south. Because trade winds from either hemisphere cancel each other out above the thermal equator in a calm, heavily clouded area known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a change in its position affects wind patterns elsewhere. For instance, in East Africa, the sediments of Lake Tanganyika were mixed less strongly during this period, indicating weaker wind systems in this area. Shifts in atmospheric patterns are believed to be the main reason why Northern Hemisphere summers generally did not cool during the Younger Dryas.

Since winds carry moisture in the form of clouds, these changes also affect precipitation. Thus, evidence from the pollen record shows that some areas have become very arid, including Scotland, North American Midwest, Anatolia and southern China. As North Africa, including the Sahara Desert, became drier, the amount of dust blown by wind had also increased. Other areas became wetter including northern China (possibly excepting the Shanxi region)

Biosphere
Younger Dryas was initially discovered around the start of the 20th century, through paleobotanical and lithostratigraphic studies of Swedish and Danish bog and lake sites, particularly the Allerød clay pit in Denmark. The analysis of fossilized pollen had consistently shown how Dryas octopetala, a plant which only thrives in glacial conditions, began to dominate where forests were able to grow during the preceding B-A Interstadial. This makes Younger Dryas a key example of how biota responded to abrupt climate change.

For instance, in what is now New England,  cool summers, combined with cold winters and low precipitation, resulted in a treeless tundra up to the onset of the Holocene, when the boreal forests shifted north. Along the southern margins of the Great Lakes, spruce dropped rapidly, while pine increased, and herbaceous prairie vegetation decreased in abundance, but increased west of the region. Central Appalachian Mountains remained forested during the Younger Dryas, but they were covered in spruce and tamarack boreal forests, switching to temperate broadleaf and mixed forests during the Holocene. Conversely, pollen and macrofossil evidence from near Lake Ontario indicates that cool, boreal forests persisted into the early Holocene.

An increase of pine pollen indicates cooler winters within the central Cascades. Speleothems from the Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve in southern Oregon's Klamath Mountains yield evidence of climatic cooling contemporaneous to the Younger Dryas. On the Olympic Peninsula, a mid-elevation site recorded a decrease in fire, but forest persisted and erosion increased during the Younger Dryas, which suggests cool and wet conditions. Speleothem records indicate an increase in precipitation in southern Oregon, the timing of which coincides with increased sizes of pluvial lakes in the northern Great Basin. Pollen record from the Siskiyou Mountains suggests a lag in timing of the Younger Dryas, indicating a greater influence of warmer Pacific conditions on that range.

Effects in the Rocky Mountain region were varied. Several sites show little to no changes in vegetation. In the northern Rockies, a significant increase in pines and firs suggests warmer conditions than before and a shift to subalpine parkland in places. That is hypothesized to be the result of a northward shift in the jet stream, combined with an increase in summer insolation as well as a winter snow pack that was higher than today, with prolonged and wetter spring seasons.

Human societies
The Younger Dryas is often linked to the Neolithic Revolution, with the adoption of agriculture in the Levant. The cold and dry Younger Dryas arguably lowered the carrying capacity of the area and forced the sedentary early Natufian population into a more mobile subsistence pattern. Further climatic deterioration is thought to have brought about cereal cultivation. While relative consensus exists regarding the role of the Younger Dryas in the changing subsistence patterns during the Natufian, its connection to the beginning of agriculture at the end of the period is still being debated.

Cause
The scientific consensus links the Younger Dryas with a significant reduction or shutdown of the thermohaline circulation – which circulates warm tropical waters northward through the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). This is consistent with climate model simulations, as well as a range of proxy evidence, such as the decreased ventilation (exposure to oxygen from the surface) of the lowest layers of North Atlantic water. Cores from the western subtropical North Atlantic show that the "bottom water" lingered there for 1,000 years, twice the age of Late Holocene bottom waters from the same site around 1,500 BP. Further, the otherwise anomalous warming of the southeastern United States matches the hypothesis that as the AMOC weakened and transported less heat from the Caribbean towards Europe through the North Atlantic Gyre, more of it would stay trapped in the coastal waters.

It was originally hypothesized that the massive outburst from paleohistorical Lake Agassiz had flooded the North Atlantic via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, but little geological evidence had been found. For instance, the salinity in the Saint Lawrence Seaway did not decline, as would have been expected from massive quantities of meltwater. More recent research instead shows that floodwaters followed a pathway along the Mackenzie River in present-day Canada, and sediment cores show that the strongest outburst had occurred right before the onset of Younger Dryas.

Other factors are also likely to have played a major role in the Younger Dryas climate. For instance, some research suggests climate in Greenland was primarily affected by the melting of then-present Fennoscandian ice sheet, which could explain why Greenland had experienced the most abrupt climatic changes during the YD. Climate models also indicate that a single freshwater outburst, no matter how large, would not have been able to weaken the AMOC for over 1,000 years, as required by the Younger Dryas timeline, unless other factors were also involved. Some modelling explains this by showing that the melting of Laurentide Ice Sheet led to greater rainfall over the Atlantic Ocean, freshening it and so helping to weaken the AMOC. Once Younger Dryas began, lowered temperatures would have elevated snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere, increasing the ice-albedo feedback. Further, melting snow would be more likely to flood back into the North Atlantic than rainfall would, as less water would be absorbed into the frozen ground. Other modelling shows that sea ice in the Arctic Ocean could have been tens of meters thick by the time of Younger Dryas onset, meaning that it would have been able to shed icebergs into the North Atlantic, which would have been able to consistently weaken the circulation. Notably, changes in sea ice cover would have had no impact on sea levels, which is consistent with the absence of significant sea level rise during the Younger Dryas, and particularly during its onset.

Some scientists also explain the lack of sea level rise during the Younger Dryas onset by connecting it with a volcanic eruption. Eruptions often deposit large quantities of sulfur dioxide particles in the atmosphere, where they are known as aerosols, and can have a large cooling effect by reflecting sunlight - a phenomenon which can also be caused by anthropogenic sulfur pollution, where it is known as global dimming. Cooling from a high latitude volcanic eruption could have accelerated North Atlantic sea ice growth, finally tipping the AMOC sufficiently to cause the Younger Dryas. Cave deposits and glacial ice cores both contain evidence of at least one major volcanic eruption taking place in the northern hemisphere at a time close to Younger Dryas onset, perhaps even completely matching the stalagmite-derived date for the onset of the Younger Dryas event. It has been suggested that this eruption would have been stronger than any during the Common Era, some of which have been able to cause several decades of cooling.

According to 1990s research, Laacher See eruption (present-day volcanic lake in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany) would have had matched the criteria, but radiocarbon dating done in 2021 pushes the date of the eruption back to 13,006 years BP, or over a century before Younger Dryas began. This analysis was also challenged in 2023, with some researchers suggesting that the radiocarbon analysis was tainted by magmatic carbon dioxide. For now, the debate continues without a conclusive proof or rejection of the volcanic hypothesis.

Extraterrestrial impact controversy
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) attributes the cooling to the impact of a disintegrating comet or asteroid. Because there is no impact crater dating to the Younger Dryas period, the proponents usually suggest the impact had struck the Laurentide ice sheet, meaning that the crater would have disappeared when the ice sheet itself had melted during the Holocene, or that it was an airburst, which would only leave micro- and nanoparticles behind as evidence. Mainstream science considers these claims to be implausible, with all of the microparticles adequately explained by the terrestrial processes. For instance, mineral inclusions from YD-period sediments in Hall's Cave,Texas have been interpreted by YDIH proponents as extraterrestrial in origin, but recent research shows they are more likely to be volcanic.

There is also a lack of evidence for either the massive wildfires which would have been caused by an airburst of sufficient size to affect the thermohaline circulation, or for simultaneous human population declines and mass animal extinctions which would have been required by this hypothesis. Images from a paper connecting the archeological site of Tall el-Hammam to a supposed airburst were later found to have been digitally manipulated.

Similar events
Statistical analysis shows that the Younger Dryas is merely the last of 25 or 26 Dansgaard–Oeschger events (D–O events) over the past 120,000 years. These episodes are characterized by abrupt changes in AMOC on the timescales of decades or centuries. The Younger Dryas is the best known and best understood because it is the most recent, but it is fundamentally similar to the previous cold phases over the past 120,000 years. This similarity makes the impact hypothesis very unlikely, and it may also contradict the Lake Agassiz hypothesis. On the other hand, some research links volcanism with D–O events, potentially supporting the volcanic hypothesis.

Events similar to Younger Dryas appear to have occurred during the other terminations - a term used to describe a comparatively rapid transition from the cold glacial conditions to warm interglacials are called terminations).  The analysis of lake and marine sediments can reconstruct past temperatures from the presence or absence of certain lipids and long chain alkenones, as these molecules are very sensitive to temperature.  This analysis provides evidence for YD-like events during Termination II (the end of the Marine Isotope Stage 6, ~130,000 years BP), III (the end of Marine Isotope Stage 8, ~243,000 years BP) and Termination IV (the end of Marine Isotope Stage 10, ~337,000 years BP. When combined with additional evidence from ice cores and paleobotanical data, some have argued that YD-like events inevitably occur during every deglaciation.

In popular culture
The 2004 film, The Day After Tomorrow depicts catastrophic climatic effects following the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation that results in a series of extreme weather events that create an abrupt climate change that leads to a new ice age.

title: Younger Dryas