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Construction engineering

Construction engineering, also known as construction operations, is a professional subdiscipline of civil engineering that deals with the designing, planning, construction, and operations management of infrastructure such as roadways, tunnels, bridges, airports, railroads, facilities, buildings, dams, utilities and other projects. Construction engineers learn some of the design aspects similar to civil engineers as well as project management aspects.

At the educational level, civil engineering students concentrate primarily on the design work which is more analytical, gearing them toward a career as a design professional. This essentially requires them to take a multitude of challenging engineering science and design courses as part of obtaining a 4-year accredited degree. Education for construction engineers is primarily focused on construction procedures, methods, costs, schedules and personnel management. Their primary concern is to deliver a project on time within budget and of the desired quality.

Regarding educational requirements, construction engineering students take basic design courses in civil engineering, as well as construction management courses.

Work activities
Being a sub-discipline of civil engineering, construction engineers apply their knowledge and business, technical and management skills obtained from their undergraduate degree to oversee projects that include bridges, buildings and housing projects. Construction engineers are heavily involved in the design and management/ allocation of funds in these projects. They are charged with risk analysis, costing and planning. A career in design work does require a professional engineer license (PE). Individuals who pursue this career path are strongly advised to sit for the Engineer in Training exam (EIT), also, referred to as the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam (FE) while in college as it takes five years' (4 years in USA) post-graduate to obtain the PE license. Some states have recently changed the PE license exam pre-requisite of 4 years work experience after graduation to become a licensed Professional Engineer where an EIT is eligible to take the PE Exam in as little as 6 months after taking the FE exam.

Entry-level construction engineers position is typically project engineers or assistant project engineers. They are responsible for preparing purchasing requisitions, processing change orders, preparing monthly budgeting reports and handling meeting minutes. The construction management position does not necessarily require a PE license; however, possessing one does make the individual more marketable, as the PE license allows the individual to sign off on temporary structure designs.

Abilities
Construction engineers are problem solvers. They contribute to the creation of infrastructure that best meets the unique demands of its environment. They must be able to understand infrastructure life cycles. When compared and contrasted to design engineers, construction engineers bring to the table their own unique perspectives for solving technical challenges with clarity and imagination. While individuals considering this career path should certainly have a strong understanding of mathematics and science, many other skills are also highly desirable, including critical and analytical thinking, time management, people management and good communication skills.

Educational requirements
Individuals looking to obtain a construction engineering degree must first ensure that the program is accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). ABET accreditation is assurance that a college or university program meets the quality standards established by the profession for which it prepares its students. In the US there are currently twenty-five programs that exist in the entire country so careful college consideration is advised.

A typical construction engineering curriculum is a mixture of engineering mechanics, engineering design, construction management and general science and mathematics. This usually leads to a Bachelor of Science degree. The B.S. degree along with some design or construction experience is sufficient for most entry-level positions. Graduate schools may be an option for those who want to go further in depth of the construction and engineering subjects taught at the undergraduate level. In most cases construction engineering graduates look to either civil engineering, engineering management or business administration as a possible graduate degree.

Job prospects
Job prospects for construction engineers generally have a strong cyclical variation. For example, starting in 2008 and continuing until at least 2011, job prospects have been poor due to the collapse of housing bubbles in many parts of the world. This sharply reduced demand for construction, forced construction professionals towards infrastructure construction and therefore increased the competition faced by established and new construction engineers. This increased competition and a core reduction in quantity demand is in parallel with a possible shift in the demand for construction engineers due to the automation of many engineering tasks, overall resulting in reduced prospects for construction engineers. In early 2010, the United States construction industry had a 27% unemployment rate, this is nearly three times higher than the 9.7% national average unemployment rate. The construction unemployment rate (including tradesmen) is comparable to the United States 1933 unemployment rate—the lowest point of the Great Depression—of 25%.

Remuneration
The average salary for a civil engineer in the UK depends on the sector and more specifically the level of experience of the individual. A 2010 survey of the remuneration and benefits of those occupying jobs in construction and the built environment industry showed that the average salary of a civil engineer in the UK is £29,582. In the United States, as of May 2013, the average was $85,640. The average salary varies depending on experience, for example the average annual salary for a civil engineer with between 3 and 6 years' experience is £23,813. For those with between 14 and 20 years' experience the average is £38,214.

title: Construction engineering


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User:Jmlynch

John M. Lynch

I was born in Dublin, Ireland and after twenty-five years moved to Arizona where I'm a Lecturer with Barrett Honors College of Arizona State University, and an Affiliate Professor with the Institute of Human Origins. My Ph.D. is in evolutionary biology, but over the past eight years I have shifted my research into the history and cultural context of evolutionary thought. Particular interests include Victorian era responses to evolutionary ideas and the resurgence of the "Argument from Design" as "Intelligent Design Theory".

I am the editor of "Vestiges and the Debates Before Darwin" (2000), "British Responses to Natural Selection, 1859-1871" (2001), and "Creationism and Scriptural Geology, 1817 - 1857" (in prep.). I also authored the entry on the history of biological sciences for "The Readers Guide to British History" (2001), and essays on Adam Sedgwick and Robert Chambers for "The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers" (in press) for which I also was the contributing editor for entries relating to evolutionary thought. I am currently studying Sedgwick's opposition to evolutionary ideas, Higher Criticism and Utilitarian ethics and the conflict between St George Jackson Mivart's Catholicism and his evolutionism.

I like to spend my time listening to Classical and folk music (Celtic & American), reading, tinkering with computers (Linux) and I appreciate more than the odd pint of Guinness!

I'm also in the process of putting together a Wiki related to Darwin and Darwinism for the classes I teach. See DarwinWiki

I can be contacted at darwinoid at asu.edu.

Pages Started - there are more, I just can't remember them!

Amhran an bhfiann / Charles Darwin / Guinness / Adam Sedgwick / Robert Chambers / The Origin of Species / Natural selection / Pangenesis / Gradualism /Methodological naturalism / Philosophical naturalism / Creationism / Lamarck / Listing of noted agnostics /

Pages Substantially Worked On (and Off)

Evolution / The Communist Manifesto

ToDo

Talk

Main namespace cleanup
Heya, I've moved Jmlynch/ToDo to User:Jmlynch/old-ToDo. There's some edit history, so perhaps you want to keep it. Otherwise just delete it (or ask an admin to do so). --fvw *  20:03, 2004 Dec 14 (UTC)
 * done -- user:zanimum

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

title: User:Jmlynch


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User:Jmlynch/ToDo

 * 1) Finish importing the The Communist Manifesto
 * 2) Write a brief introduction to above

 * 1) Work on the Lamarck entry. See about importing "Zoological Philosophy"

 * 1) Wikify The Origin of Species

 * 1) Import and Wikify Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

 * 1) Entries for Robert Chambers and Adam Sedgwick

 * 1) Expand entries on Hominid fossils

 * See also : user:Jmlynch

title: User:Jmlynch/ToDo


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Gundam

Gundam (ガンダムシリーズ) is a Japanese military science fiction media franchise. Created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Sunrise (now Bandai Namco Filmworks), the franchise features giant robots, or mecha, with the name "Gundam". The franchise began on April 7, 1979, with Mobile Suit Gundam, a TV series that defined the "real robot" mecha anime genre by featuring giant robots called mobile suits (including the original titular mecha) in a militaristic setting. The popularity of the series and its merchandise spawned a franchise that includes 50 TV series, films and OVAs as well as manga, novels and video games, along with a whole industry of plastic model kits known as Gunpla which makes up 90 percent of the Japanese character plastic-model market.

Academics in Japan have viewed the series as inspiration; in 2008, the virtual Gundam Academy was planned as the first academic institution based on an animated TV series.

As of March 2020, the franchise is fully owned by Bandai Namco Holdings through subsidiaries Sotsu and Sunrise. The Gundam franchise had grossed over US$5 billion in retail sales by 2000. By 2022, the annual revenue of the Gundam franchise reached ¥101.7 billion per year, ¥44.2 billion of which was retail sales of toys and hobby items.

Concept
Mobile Suit Gundam was developed by animator Yoshiyuki Tomino and a changing group of Sunrise creators with the collective pseudonym of Hajime Yatate. The series was originally entitled Freedom Fighter Gunboy (or Gunboy) for the robot's gun, with teen boys the primary target demographic. Early production had a number of references to freedom: the White Base was originally "Freedom's Fortress", the Core Fighter was the "Freedom Wing" and the Gunperry was the "Freedom Cruiser". The Yatate team combined the English word "gun" with the last syllable of the word "freedom" to form the portmanteau Gundom. Tomino changed it to Gundam, suggesting a unit wielding a gun powerful enough to hold back enemies like a hydroelectric dam holding back water. In keeping with the concept, Gundams are depicted as prototypes or limited-production, with higher capabilities than mass-produced units.

Most Gundams are large, bipedal, humanoid vehicles controlled from a cockpit by a human pilot. The cockpit is located in the torso, while the head serves as a camera to transmit images back to the cockpit. Most of the series protagonists are Newtypes, genetically advanced humans adapted for space. Newtypes have psychic abilities that enable them to sense each other across space and to utilize special mobile suits.

The series itself has been described as a space opera.

Innovation
Mobile Suit Gundam reportedly pioneered the real robot subgenre of mecha anime. In contrast to its super robot cousins, Mobile Suit Gundam attempted realism in its robot design and weaponry by running out of energy and ammunition or malfunctioning. Its technology is derived from actual science (such as Lagrange points and the O'Neill cylinder in space, and the use of Helium-3 as an energy source) or feasible technology requiring only a few fictional elements to function (such as Minovsky Physics).

Timelines
Most of the Gundam animation (including the earliest series) is set in what is known as the Universal Century (UC) calendar era, with later series set in alternate calendars or timelines. Although many new Gundam stories are told in their parallel universe with independent timelines (giving them greater creative freedom), the original UC storyline continues to be popular, with new installments frequently produced ever since. It established the series, setting the standard for hard science fiction in anime; the original Gundam marked the maturing of the giant-robot genre. Nostalgia for the oldest Gundam shows (and its status as a pop-culture icon in Japan) is a factor in its continuing success.

Spinoffs
SD Gundam, a spinoff of Gundam which began during the mid-1980s, features super deformed designs and emphasizes comedy and adventure. Model Suit Gunpla Builders Beginning G, Gundam Build Fighters, and Gundam Build Divers feature contemporary settings and use Gunpla as plot elements.

TV series, films, and video
Except for Mobile Suit Gundam 00, which follows the current calendar era, all Gundam series are set in a fictional era, with a new calendar adopted after a drastic event or chain of events and typically involve a major conflict involving Earth and space colonies (and in some cases the Moon and terraformed planets). An exception is the Gundam Build timeline, which is set in an alternate present time where all other Gundam installments are fictional.

Live-action film
At the 2018 Anime Expo, Legendary Pictures and Sunrise announced a collaboration to develop a live-action Gundam film. Brian K. Vaughan was brought in to write and serve as an executive producer for the film. In April 2021, it was reported that the project had landed at Netflix and that Jordan Vogt-Roberts had been hired to direct.

Manga and novels
Manga adaptations of the Gundam series have been published in English in North America by a number of companies, such as Viz Media, Del Rey Manga and Tokyopop, and in Singapore by Chuang Yi.

Video games
Gundam has spawned over 80 video games for arcade, computer and console platforms, some with characters not found in other Gundam media. Some of the games, in turn inspired spinoff novels and manga.

Gunpla
Primarily made of plastic, but sometimes paired with resin and metal detail parts, hundreds of Gundam scale plastic models, aka Gunpla, have been released. They range in quality from toolless-build children's toy kits (Entry Grades) to hobbyist and museum-grade models, and most are in common scales such as 1:35, 1:48, 1:60, 1:100 or 1:144 scale. Various Grades exist to target hobbyists, ranging from smaller sized kits such as High Grade and Real Grade, to larger Master Grade and finally Perfect Grade model kits. The Real Grade (RG) Gundam series combined the Master Grade's detailed inner structure with additional colour separation, making the 1:144-scale series complex in design and compact in size, with the final goal of retooling a Gundam to what they might would look like in real life, similar to the real-life Gundam Front Tokyo RX-78-02.

Promotional 1:6 or 1:12 scale models are supplied to retailers and are not commercially available. For Gundam 30th anniversary, a full-size RX-78-2 Gundam model was constructed and displayed at Gundam Front Tokyo, in the Odaiba district; it was taken down on March 5, 2017. A new statue of the Unicorn Gundam was erected at the same location, now renamed The Gundam Base Tokyo.

Other merchandise
Bandai, Gundam primary licensee, produces a variety of products. Other companies produce unofficial merchandise, such as toys, models and T-shirts. Products include Mobile Suit In Action (MSiA) action figures and Gundam model kits in several scales and design complexities. Each series generally has its own set of products, MSiA and model lines such as Master Grade and High Grade Universal Century may extend across series. The most popular action-figure line has been the Gundam Fix series, which includes the mecha in the animated series, manga and novels and accessories to create an updated version. In addition to Master Grade and High Grade Gundams, Bandai released a 30th-anniversary series of Gundam models in 2010. After the introduction of the RG Gunpla line, Bandai released the Metal Build series in March 2011 (beginning with the 00 Gundam).

Internet
Bandai maintains several websites to promote Gundam projects; Gundam Perfect Web is the official Japanese site. Its English-language counterpart is the US-maintained Gundam Official. In 2005, the website hosted the Gundam Official User Forum. The forum was based on the existing fan forum, Gundam Watch, using many of its staff. When the project was retired, Gundam Watch was reborn and became Gundam Evolution.

A number of series-specific websites have been created, often available for a limited time (usually to promote a DVD release). Common content includes character and mecha listings, lists of related merchandise and pay-for-download content. Special pages are frequent, often presenting downloadable wallpaper or a small game. The Superior Defender Gundam Force website has a game in which players take the role of villain Commander Sazabi, attempting to blast his subordinate with weapons.

Global spread
Since 1980, Gundam has also appeared in the following countries and regions:

Impact
Gundam is a Japanese cultural icon; it is a ¥50-billion-annual business of Bandai Namco, reaching ¥54.5 billion annual revenue by 2006, and ¥80.2 billion annual revenue by 2014. Stamps have been issued, an Agriculture Ministry employee was reprimanded for contributing to the Japanese Wikipedia Gundam-related pages, and the Japan Self-Defense Forces has code-named its developing advance personal-combat system Gundam. Based on a December 16, 2023 survey conducted by Nikkei Entertainment, the fanbase of Gundam within Japan has an average age of 42 years, and a male-to-female ratio that skews 90:10.

The impact of Gundam in Japan has been compared to the impact of Star Wars in the United States.

title: Gundam


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User talk:Jmlynch

Feel free to make comments and suggestions. John Lynch

Fancy running into you again -- you may not recall, but I sent you an e-mail praising your websites, at Rutgers I think. I noticed you've published one of Darwin's texts here. Perfectly ethical, of course, but does it fall inside the confines of what wikipedia represents? It has various pros (instant reference, no need to worry about another website being down) and cons (not truly an encyclopedia article, adds additional debris to be searched through when wiki runs a search).

Might it be worthwhile to input a feature request, that certain articles be labelled as supporting texts? The online element and cheap hard drive prices provide an interesting opportunity to do things just like this that make wikipedia so much more valuable, but perhaps the idea could be refined even more. Well, perhaps I'm just rambling, but do reply if you have the time. Colin dellow

Hi John, is your Darwin wiki open content? --Larry Sanger

Yup

Very good! I think it would be much better if you kept your coursework materials on the your wiki and encyclopedic-type materials on Wikipedia; this would avoid the inevitable busywork that a fork will inevitably cause. But I guess you have your reasons. --Larry

Once entries on DarwinWiki reach a mature form, I intend to transfer them over to the Wikipedia. Hopefully that's a more efficient way of doing things. I have a ton of lecture notes that I'm willing to use - I just need time :) I'm also hoping to seduce some brave souls into adding stuff to the resources my students will use.

Sounds great. That might actually be more efficient for you anyway! --Larry

Hello! I'm an anthropology student at ASU. We probably know some of the same people. Mkrose

Hi I'm a prebusiness student at ASU. I'm glad there are some Irish at ASU. I havn't heard the Irish brogue since... well. It's been a long time. Are you a dual citizen? My mom is, she has an irish passport too, I think that's pretty cool (yay, go mom!). And hopefully the San Fransisco Irish Consulate will also consider me one of their minions, and hand over my passport too!

There is a new notice board set up for Irish Wikipedians at User:Ludraman/Irish Wikipedians notice board. Ludraman | Talk 09:04, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikimedia UK/Wikimania 2006
Hi, this is a circular to Wikipedians in Ireland to draw your attention to Wikimedia UK, where the establishment of a local Wikimedia chapter for the United Kingdom (and possibly for the Republic of Ireland) is being discussed. See the talk page, as well as the mailing list; a meetup will take place to discuss matters in London in September, for anyone who can get there. On another topic, plans are being drawn up for a UK bid for Wikimania 2006, which would be conveniently close to Ireland. On the other hand, Dublin's bid was one of the final three last year - might we bid again? --Kwekubo 04:05, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Apologies
I'd like to apologize if my bad faith effort gets List of agnostics deleted. I don't know if you even much care about that article these days, or are even here, but as you mention it on your main page I thought I should say sorry.--T. Anthony 07:14, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

note
Just in case as an Arizonan you know anything of Spider Ranch, whether it's locally notable or not. Articles for deletion/Spider Ranch. Herostratus 20:08, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Your user page
I found your old user page while checking out some old edits. I have history merged it, so that all edits are in one place. Hope you don't mind. Graham 87 14:06, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

 * And I've just done the same thing to your talk page. Graham 87 06:16, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

title: User talk:Jmlynch


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Middle English

Middle English (abbreviated to ME ) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but Oxford University Press specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1100 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages.

Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English literary variety broke down and writing in English became fragmented and localized and was, for the most part, being improvised. By the end of the period (about 1470), and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, a standard based on the London dialects (Chancery Standard) had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by Early Modern English, which lasted until about 1650. Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the Northumbrian dialect (prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast Scotland).

During the Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective, and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Anglo-Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in the later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift.

Little survives of early Middle English literature, due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Canterbury Tales remains the most studied and read work of the period.

Transition from Old English

The transition from Late Old English to Early Middle English occurred at some point during the 12th century.

The influence of Old Norse aided the development of English from a synthetic language with relatively free word order to a more analytic language with a stricter word order. Both Old English and Old Norse (as well as the descendants of the latter, Faroese and Icelandic) were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. The eagerness of Vikings in the Danelaw to communicate with their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages. Old Norse may have had a more profound impact on Middle and Modern English development than any other language. Simeon Potter says, "No less far-reaching was the influence of Scandinavian upon the inflexional endings of English in hastening that wearing away and leveling of grammatical forms which gradually spread from north to south."

Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in pronouns, modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like "hence" and "together"), conjunctions, and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings, yet no texts exist in either Scandinavia or Northern England from this period to give certain evidence of an influence on syntax. However, at least one scholarly study of this influence shows that Old English may have been replaced entirely by Norse, by virtue of the change from the Old English syntax to Norse syntax. The effect of Old Norse on Old English was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character. Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with some words in common, they roughly understood each other; in time, the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged. It is most "important to recognise that in many words the English and Scandinavian language differed chiefly in their inflectional elements. The body of the word was so nearly the same in the two languages that only the endings would put obstacles in the way of mutual understanding. In the mixed population that existed in the Danelaw, these endings must have led to much confusion, tending gradually to become obscured and finally lost." This blending of peoples and languages resulted in "simplifying English grammar".

While the influence of Scandinavian languages was strongest in the dialects of the Danelaw region and Scotland, words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English. Influence on the written language only appeared at the beginning of the 13th century, probably because of a scarcity of literary texts from an earlier date.

The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers who spoke a dialect of Old French, now known as Old Norman, which developed in England into Anglo-Norman. The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of words of Norman origin began to appear in the English language alongside native English words of similar meaning, giving rise to such Modern English synonyms as pig/pork, chicken/poultry, calf/veal, cow/beef, sheep/mutton, wood/forest, house/mansion, worthy/valuable, bold/courageous, freedom/liberty, sight/vision, and eat/dine. The role of Anglo-Norman as the language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman, such as court, judge, jury, appeal, and parliament. There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the chivalric cultures that arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism, seigneurialism, and crusading.

Words were often taken from Latin, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms, including kingly (inherited from Old English), royal (from French, which inherited it from Vulgar Latin), and regal (from French, which borrowed it from classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of resultant cognate pairs include the words warden (from Norman) and guardian (from later French; both share a common ancestor loaned from Germanic).

The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same dialects as they had before the Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that evolved individually from Old English.

Early Middle English
Early Middle English (1100–1300) has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country) but a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the dative and instrumental cases were replaced in Early Middle English with prepositional constructions. The Old English genitive -es survives in the -'s of the modern English possessive, but most of the other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of the roughly one dozen forms of the definite article ("the"). The dual personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) also disappeared from English during this period.

Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman (and subsequently French) remained the dominant language of literature and law until the 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages (though more slowly and to a lesser extent), and therefore, it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the vernacular. It is also argued that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse and English speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology, the Norse speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings.

Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the Peterborough Chronicle, which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the Ormulum, a biblical commentary probably composed in Lincolnshire in the second half of the 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group, religious texts written for anchoresses, apparently in the West Midlands in the early 13th century. The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the AB language.

More literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include Layamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale.

Some scholars have defined "Early Middle English" as encompassing English texts up to 1350. This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances (especially those of the Auchinleck manuscript c. 1330).

14th century
From around the early 14th century, there was significant migration into London, particularly from the counties of the East Midlands, and a new prestige London dialect began to develop, based chiefly on the speech of the East Midlands but also influenced by that of other regions. The writing of this period, however, continues to reflect a variety of regional forms of English. The Ayenbite of Inwyt, a translation of a French confessional prose work, completed in 1340, is written in a Kentish dialect. The best known writer of Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote in the second half of the 14th century in the emerging London dialect, although he also portrays some of his characters as speaking in northern dialects, as in the "Reeve's Tale".

In the English-speaking areas of lowland Scotland, an independent standard was developing, based on the Northumbrian dialect. This would develop into what came to be known as the Scots language.

A large number of terms for abstract concepts were adopted directly from scholastic philosophical Latin (rather than via French). Examples are "absolute", "act", "demonstration", and "probable".

Late Middle English
The Chancery Standard of written English emerged c. 1430 in official documents that, since the Norman Conquest, had normally been written in French. Like Chaucer's work, this new standard was based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Clerks using this standard were usually familiar with French and Latin, influencing the forms they chose. The Chancery Standard, which was adopted slowly, was used in England by bureaucrats for most official purposes, excluding those of the Church and legalities, which used Latin and Law French respectively.

The Chancery Standard's influence on later forms of written English is disputed, but it did undoubtedly provide the core around which Early Modern English formed. Early Modern English emerged with the help of William Caxton's printing press, developed during the 1470s. The press stabilized English through a push towards standardization, led by Chancery Standard enthusiast and writer Richard Pynson. Early Modern English began in the 1540s after the printing and wide distribution of the English Bible and Prayer Book, which made the new standard of English publicly recognizable and lasted until about 1650.

Phonology
The main changes between the Old English sound system and that of Middle English include:
 * Emergence of the voiced fricatives, , as separate phonemes, rather than mere allophones of the corresponding voiceless fricatives
 * Reduction of the Old English diphthongs to monophthongs and the emergence of new diphthongs due to vowel breaking in certain positions, change of Old English post-vocalic, (sometimes resulting from the  allophone of ) to offglides, and borrowing from French
 * Merging of Old English into a single vowel
 * Raising of the long vowel to
 * Rounding of to  in the southern dialects
 * Unrounding of the front rounded vowels in most dialects
 * Lengthening of vowels in open syllables (and in certain other positions). The resultant long vowels (and other preexisting long vowels) subsequently underwent changes of quality in the Great Vowel Shift, which began during the later Middle English period.
 * Loss of gemination (double consonants came to be pronounced as single ones)
 * Loss of weak final vowels (schwa, written $\langlee\rangle$). By Chaucer's time, this vowel was silent in normal speech, although it was normally pronounced in verse as the meter required (much as occurs in modern French). Also, nonfinal unstressed $\langlee\rangle$ was dropped when adjacent to only a single consonant on either side if there was another short $⟨e⟩$ in an adjoining syllable. Thus, every began to be pronounced as evry, and palmeres as palmers.

The combination of the last three processes listed above led to the spelling conventions associated with silent and doubled consonants (see under Orthography, below).

Nouns
Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from the more complex system of inflection in Old English: Nouns of the weak declension are primarily inherited from Old English n-stem nouns but also from ō-stem, wō-stem, and u-stem nouns, which did not inflect in the same way as n-stem nouns in Old English, but joined the weak declension in Middle English. Nouns of the strong declension are inherited from the other Old English noun stem classes.

Some nouns of the strong type have an -e in the nominative/accusative singular, like the weak declension, but otherwise strong endings. Often, these are the same nouns that had an -e in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English (they, in turn, were inherited from Proto-Germanic ja-stem and i-stem nouns).

The distinct dative case was lost in early Middle English. The genitive survived, however, but by the end of the Middle English period, only the strong -'s ending (variously spelt) was in use. Some formerly feminine nouns, as well as some weak nouns, continued to make their genitive forms with -e or no ending (e.g., fole hoves, horses' hooves), and nouns of relationship ending in -er frequently have no genitive ending (e.g., fader bone, "father's bane").

The strong -(e)s plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak -(e)n form is now rare and used only in oxen and as part of a double plural, in children and brethren. Some dialects still have forms such as eyen (for eyes), shoon (for shoes), hosen (for hose(s)), kine (for cows), and been (for bees).

Grammatical gender survived to a limited extent in early Middle English before being replaced by natural gender in the course of the Middle English period. Grammatical gender was indicated by agreement of articles and pronouns (e.g., þo ule "the feminine owl") or using the pronoun he to refer to masculine nouns such as helm ("helmet"), or phrases such as scaft stærcne (strong shaft), with the masculine accusative adjective ending -ne.

Adjectives
Single-syllable adjectives added -e when modifying a noun in the plural and when used after the definite article (þe), after a demonstrative (þis, þat), after a possessive pronoun (e.g., hir, our), or with a name or in a form of address. This derives from the Old English "weak" declension of adjectives. This inflexion continued to be used in writing even after final -e had ceased to be pronounced. In earlier texts, multisyllable adjectives also receive a final -e in these situations, but this occurs less regularly in later Middle English texts. Otherwise, adjectives have no ending and adjectives already ending in -e etymologically receive no ending as well.

Earlier texts sometimes inflect adjectives for case as well. Layamon's Brut inflects adjectives for the masculine accusative, genitive, and dative, the feminine dative, and the plural genitive. The Owl and the Nightingale adds a final -e to all adjectives not in the nominative, here only inflecting adjectives in the weak declension (as described above).

Comparatives and superlatives were usually formed by adding -er and -est. Adjectives with long vowels sometimes shortened these vowels in the comparative and superlative (e.g., greet, great; gretter, greater). Adjectives ending in -ly or -lich formed comparatives either with -lier, -liest or -loker, -lokest. A few adjectives also displayed Germanic umlaut in their comparatives and superlatives, such as long, lenger. Other irregular forms were mostly the same as in modern English.

Pronouns
Middle English personal pronouns were mostly developed from those of Old English, with the exception of the third person plural, a borrowing from Old Norse (the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped). Also, the nominative form of the feminine third person singular was replaced by a form of the demonstrative that developed into sche (modern she), but the alternative heyr remained in some areas for a long time.

As with nouns, there was some inflectional simplification (the distinct Old English dual forms were lost), but pronouns, unlike nouns, retained distinct nominative and accusative forms. Third person pronouns also retained a distinction between accusative and dative forms, but that was gradually lost: The masculine hine was replaced by him south of the River Thames by the early 14th century, and the neuter dative him was ousted by it in most dialects by the 15th.

The following table shows some of the various Middle English pronouns. Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources because of differences in spellings and pronunciations at different times and in different dialects.

Verbs
As a general rule, the indicative first person singular of verbs in the present tense ended in -e (e.g., ich here, "I hear"), the second person singular in -(e)st (e.g., þou spekest, "thou speakest"), and the third person singular in -eþ (e.g., he comeþ, "he cometh/he comes"). (þ (the letter "thorn") is pronounced like the unvoiced th in "think", but under certain circumstances, it may be like the voiced th in "that"). The following table illustrates a typical conjugation pattern: Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving the Old English -eþ, Midland dialects showing -en from about 1200, and Northern forms using -es in the third person singular as well as the plural.

The past tense of weak verbs was formed by adding an -ed(e), -d(e), or -t(e) ending. The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also served as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i-, y-, and sometimes bi-.

Strong verbs, by contrast, formed their past tense by changing their stem vowel (e.g., binden became bound, a process called apophony), as in Modern English.

Orthography
With the discontinuation of the Late West Saxon standard used for the writing of Old English in the period prior to the Norman Conquest, Middle English came to be written in a wide variety of scribal forms, reflecting different regional dialects and orthographic conventions. Later in the Middle English period, however, and particularly with the development of the Chancery Standard in the 15th century, orthography became relatively standardised in a form based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Spelling at the time was mostly quite regular. (There was a fairly consistent correspondence between letters and sounds.) The irregularity of present-day English orthography is largely due to pronunciation changes that have taken place over the Early Modern English and Modern English eras.

Middle English generally did not have silent letters. For example, knight was pronounced (with both the  and the  pronounced, the latter sounding as the $\langlech\rangle$ in German Knecht). The major exception was the silent $⟨e⟩$ – originally pronounced but lost in normal speech by Chaucer's time. This letter, however, came to indicate a lengthened – and later also modified – pronunciation of a preceding vowel. For example, in name, originally pronounced as two syllables, the /a/ in the first syllable (originally an open syllable) lengthened, the final weak vowel was later dropped, and the remaining long vowel was modified in the Great Vowel Shift (for these sound changes, see Phonology, above). The final $⟨e⟩$, now silent, thus became the indicator of the longer and changed pronunciation of $⟨a⟩$. In fact, vowels could have this lengthened and modified pronunciation in various positions, particularly before a single consonant letter and another vowel or before certain pairs of consonants.

A related convention involved the doubling of consonant letters to show that the preceding vowel was not to be lengthened. In some cases, the double consonant represented a sound that was (or had previously been) geminated (i.e., had genuinely been "doubled" and would thus have regularly blocked the lengthening of the preceding vowel). In other cases, by analogy, the consonant was written double merely to indicate the lack of lengthening.

Alphabet
The basic Old English Latin alphabet consisted of 20 standard letters plus four additional letters: ash $⟨æ⟩$, eth $⟨ð⟩$, thorn $⟨þ⟩$, and wynn $⟨ƿ⟩$. There was not yet a distinct j, v, or w, and Old English scribes did not generally use k, q, or z.

Ash was no longer required in Middle English, as the Old English vowel that it represented had merged into /a/. The symbol nonetheless came to be used as a ligature for the digraph $\langleae\rangle$ in many words of Greek or Latin origin, as did $⟨œ⟩$ for $⟨oe⟩$.

Eth and thorn both represented or its allophone  in Old English. Eth fell out of use during the 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century and was replaced by th (digraph). Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation (þe, "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as $\langley\rangle$ in this context; see ye olde.

Wynn, which represented the phoneme, was replaced by $\langlew\rangle$ during the 13th century. Due to its similarity to the letter $\langlep\rangle$, it is mostly represented by $\langlew\rangle$ in modern editions of Old and Middle English texts even when the manuscript has wynn.

Under Norman influence, the continental Carolingian minuscule replaced the insular script that had been used for Old English. However, because of the significant difference in appearance between the old insular g and the Carolingian g (modern g), the former continued in use as a separate letter, known as yogh, written $⟨ȝ⟩$. This was adopted for use to represent a variety of sounds:, while the Carolingian g was normally used for [g]. Instances of yogh were eventually replaced by $⟨j⟩$ or $⟨y⟩$ and by $⟨gh⟩$ in words like night and laugh. In Middle Scots, yogh became indistinguishable from cursive z, and printers tended to use $\langlez\rangle$ when yogh was not available in their fonts; this led to new spellings (often giving rise to new pronunciations), as in McKenzie, where the $⟨z⟩$ replaced a yogh, which had the pronunciation.

Under continental influence, the letters, , and , which had not normally been used by Old English scribes, came to be commonly used in the writing of Middle English. Also, the newer Latin letter was introduced (replacing wynn). The distinct letter forms v| and u| came into use but were still used interchangeably; the same applies to j| and i|. (For example, spellings such as wijf and paradijs for "wife" and "paradise" can be found in Middle English.)

The consonantal / was sometimes used to transliterate the Hebrew letter yodh, representing the palatal approximant sound (and transliterated in Greek by iota and in Latin by ); words like Jerusalem, Joseph, etc. would have originally followed the Latin pronunciation beginning with, that is, the sound of  in yes. In some words, however, notably from Old French, / was used for the affricate consonant, as in joie (modern "joy"), used in Wycliffe's Bible. This was similar to the geminate sound, which had been represented as in Old English. By the time of Modern English, the sound came to be written as / at the start of words (like "joy"), and usually as elsewhere (as in "bridge"). It could also be written, mainly in French loanwords, as, with the adoption of the soft G convention (age, page, etc.)

Other symbols
Many scribal abbreviations were also used. It was common for the Lollards to abbreviate the name of Jesus (as in Latin manuscripts) to ihc. The letters and  were often omitted and indicated by a macron above an adjacent letter, so for example, in could be written as ī. A thorn with a superscript or  could be used for that and the; the thorn here resembled a, giving rise to the ye of "Ye Olde". Various forms of the ampersand replaced the word and.

Numbers were still always written using Roman numerals, except for some rare occurrences of Arabic numerals during the 15th century.

Letter-to-sound correspondences
Although Middle English spelling was never fully standardised, the following table shows the pronunciations most usually represented by particular letters and digraphs towards the end of the Middle English period, using the notation given in the article on Middle English phonology. As explained above, single vowel letters had alternative pronunciations depending on whether they were in a position where their sounds had been subject to lengthening. Long vowel pronunciations were in flux due to the beginnings of the Great Vowel Shift.

Sample texts
Most of the following Modern English translations are poetic sense-for-sense translations, not word-for-word translations.

Ormulum, 12th century
This passage explains the background to the Nativity (3494–501) :

Epitaph of John the smyth, died 1371
An epitaph from a monumental brass in an Oxfordshire parish church:

Wycliffe's Bible, 1384
From the Wycliffe's Bible, (1384):

Chaucer, 1390s
The following is the very beginning of the General Prologue from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The text was written in a dialect associated with London and spellings associated with the then-emergent Chancery Standard.

Gower, 1390
The following is the beginning of the Prologue from Confessio Amantis by John Gower.

Translation in Modern English: (by J. Dow)

"Of those who wrote before we were born, books survive, So we are taught what was written by them when they were alive. So it's good that we, in our times here on earth, write of new matters – Following the example of our forefathers – So that, in such a way, we may leave our knowledge to the world after we are dead and gone. But it's said, and it is true, that if one only reads of wisdom all day long It often dulls one's brains. So, if it's alright with you, I'll take the middle route and write a book between the two – Somewhat of amusement, and somewhat of fact. In that way, somebody might, more or less, like that."

title: Middle English


text:
Regional science

Regional science is a field of the social sciences concerned with analytical approaches to problems that are specifically urban, rural, or regional. Topics in regional science include, but are not limited to location theory or spatial economics, location modeling, transportation, migration analysis, land use and urban development, interindustry analysis, environmental and ecological analysis, resource management, urban and regional policy analysis, geographical information systems, and spatial data analysis. In the broadest sense, any social science analysis that has a spatial dimension is embraced by regional scientists.

Origins
Regional science was founded in the late 1940s when some economists began to become dissatisfied with the low level of regional economic analysis and felt an urge to upgrade it. But even in this early era, the founders of regional science expected to catch the interest of people from a wide variety of disciplines. Regional science's formal roots date to the aggressive campaigns by Walter Isard and his supporters to promote the "objective" and "scientific" analysis of settlement, industrial location, and urban development. Isard targeted key universities and campaigned tirelessly. Accordingly, the Regional Science Association was founded in 1954, when the core group of scholars and practitioners held its first meetings independent from those initially held as sessions of the annual meetings of the American Economics Association. A reason for meeting independently undoubtedly was the group's desire to extend the new science beyond the rather restrictive world of economists and have natural scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, sociologists, political scientists, planners, and geographers join the club. Now called the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), it maintains subnational and international associations, journals, and a conference circuit (notably in North America, continental Europe, Japan, and South Korea). Membership in the RSAI continues to grow.

Seminal publications
Topically speaking, regional science took off in the wake of Walter Christaller's book Die Zentralen Orte in Sűddeutschland (Verlag von Gustav Fischer, Jena, 1933; transl. Central Places in Southern Germany, 1966), soon followed by Tord Palander's (1935) Beiträge zur Standortstheorie; August Lösch's Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft (Verlag von Gustav Fischer, Jena, 1940; 2nd rev. edit., 1944; transl. The Economics of Location, 1954); and Edgar M. Hoover's two books--Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industry (1938) and The Location of Economic Activity (1948). Other important early publications include: Edward H. Chamberlin's (1950) The Theory of Monopolistic Competition; François Perroux's (1950) Economic Spaces: Theory and Application; Torsten Hägerstrand's (1953) Innovationsförloppet ur Korologisk Synpunkt; Edgar S. Dunn's (1954)The Location of Agricultural Production; Martin J. Beckmann, C.B McGuire, and Clifford B. Winston's (1956) Studies in the Economics of Transportation; Melvin L. Greenhut's (1956) Plant Location in Theory and Practice; Gunnar Myrdal's (1957) Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions; Albert O. Hirschman's (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development; and Claude Ponsard's (1958) Histoire des Théories Économiques Spatiales. Nonetheless, Walter Isard's first book in 1956, Location and Space Economy, apparently captured the imagination of many, and his third, Methods of Regional Analysis, published in 1960, only sealed his position as the father of the field.

As is typically the case, the above works were built on the shoulders of giants. Much of this predecessor work is documented well in Walter Isard's Location and Space Economy as well as Claude Ponsard's Histoire des Théorie Économique Spatiales. Particularly important was the contribution by 19th century German economists to location theory. The early German hegemony more or less starts with Johann Heinrich von Thünen and runs through both Wilhelm Launhardt and Alfred Weber to Walter Christaller and August Lösch.

Core journals
If an academic discipline is identified by its journals, then technically regional science began in 1955 with the publication of the first volume of the Papers and Proceedings, Regional Science Association (now Papers in Regional Science published by Springer). In 1958, the Journal of Regional Science followed. Since the 1970s, the number of journals serving the field has exploded. The RSAI website displays most of them.

Most recently the journal Spatial Economic Analysis has been published by the RSAI British and Irish Section with the Regional Studies Association. The latter is a separate and growing organisation involving economists, planners, geographers, political scientists, management academics, policymakers, and practitioners.

Academic programs
Walter Isard's efforts culminated in the creation of a few academic departments and several university-wide programs in regional science. At Walter Isard's suggestion, the University of Pennsylvania started the Regional Science Department in 1956. It featured as its first graduate William Alonso and was looked upon by many to be the international academic leader for the field. Another important graduate and faculty member of the department is Masahisa Fujita. The core curriculum of this department was microeconomics, input-output analysis, location theory, and statistics. Faculty also taught courses in mathematical programming, transportation economics, labor economics, energy and ecological policy modeling, spatial statistics, spatial interaction theory and models, benefit/cost analysis, urban and regional analysis, and economic development theory, among others. But the department's unusual multidisciplinary orientation undoubtedly encouraged its demise, and it lost its department status in 1993.

With a few exceptions, such as Cornell University, which awards graduate degrees in Regional Science, most practitioners hold positions in departments such as economics, geography, civil engineering, agricultural economics, rural sociology, urban planning, public policy, or demography. The diversity of disciplines participating in regional science have helped make it one of the most interesting and fruitful fields of academic specialization, but it has also made it difficult to fit the many perspectives into a curriculum for an academic major. It is even difficult for authors to write regional science textbooks, since what is elementary knowledge for one discipline might be entirely novel for another.

Public policy impact
Part of the movement was, and continues to be, associated with the political and economic realities of the role of the local community. On any occasion where public policy is directed at the sub-national level, such as a city or group of counties, the methods of regional science can prove useful. Traditionally, regional science has provided policymakers with guidance on the following issues:
 * Determinants of industrial location (both within the nation and region)
 * Regional economic impact of the arrival or departure of a firm
 * Determinants of internal migration patterns and land-use change
 * Regional specialization and exchange
 * Environmental impacts of social and economic change
 * Geographic association of economic and social conditions

By targeting federal resources to specific geographic areas the Kennedy administration realized that political favors could be bought. This is also evident in Europe and other places where local economic areas do not coincide with political boundaries. In the more current era of devolution knowledge about "local solutions to local problems" has driven much of the interest in regional science. Thus, there has been much political impetus to the growth of the discipline.

Developments after 1980
Regional science has enjoyed mixed fortunes since the 1980s. While it has gained a larger following among economists and public policy practitioners, the discipline has fallen out of favor among more radical and post-modernist geographers. In an apparent effort to secure a larger share of research funds, geographers had the National Science Foundation's Geography and Regional Science Program renamed "Geography and Spatial Sciences".

New economic geography
In 1991, Paul Krugman, as a highly regarded international trade theorist, put out a call for economists to pay more attention to economic geography in a book entitled Geography and Trade, focusing largely on the core regional science concept of agglomeration economies. Krugman's call renewed interest by economists in regional science and, perhaps more importantly, founded what some term the "new economic geography", which enjoys much common ground with regional science. Broadly trained "new economic geographers" combine quantitative work with other research techniques, for example at the London School of Economics. The unification of Europe and the increased internationalization of the world's economic, social, and political realms has further induced interest in the study of regional, as opposed to national, phenomena. The new economic geography appears to have garnered more interest in Europe than in America where amenities, notably climate, have been found to better predict human location and re-location patterns, as emphasized in recent work by Mark Partridge. In 2008 Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and his Prize Lecture has references both to work in regional science's location theory as well as economic's trade theory.

Criticisms
Today there are dwindling numbers of regional scientists from academic planning programs and mainstream geography departments. Attacks on regional science's practitioners by radical critics began as early as the 1970s, notably David Harvey who believed it lacked social and political commitment. Regional science's founder, Walter Isard, never envisioned regional scientists would be political or planning activists. In fact, he suggested that they will seek to be sitting in front of a computer and surrounded by research assistants. Trevor J. Barnes suggests the decline of regional science practice among planners and geographers in North America could have been avoided. He says "It is unreflective, and consequently inured to change, because of a commitment to a God’s eye view. It is so convinced of its own rightness, of its Archimedean position, that it remained aloof and invariant, rather than being sensitive to its changing local context."

title: Regional science


text:
Zygnematales

The Zygnematales (ζυγός (zygós) and νῆμα (nḗma) (nom.), νήματος (nḗmatos) (gen.)), also called the Conjugatales, are an order of green algae, comprising several thousand different species in two families. The larger family Zygnemataceae, with well-known genera such as Zygnema and Spirogyra, includes members that grow as unbranched filaments, which grow longer through normal cell division. This group includes the desmids. Most members of both families live in freshwater, and form an important component of the algal scum that grows on or near plants and rocks.

Systematically they fall within the division Charophyta/Streptophyta, in which the land plants (Embryophyta) emerged.

Sexual reproduction in Zygnematales takes place through a process called conjugation. Here filaments of opposite gender line up, and tubes form between corresponding cells. The male cells then become amoeboid and crawl across, or sometimes both cells crawl into the tube. The cells then meet and fuse to form a zygote, which later undergoes meiosis to produce new filaments. As in plants, only the female passes chloroplasts on to the offspring.

Other conjugating algae are the Mesotaeniaceae, sister of the Zygnematales, and Spirotaenia, a basal green algae. Additionally, the Desmidiales appear to have emerged deep within the Zygnematales, and are also conjugating.

title: Zygnematales


text:
Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935).

Several of his notable works were critical of American capitalism and materialism during the interwar period. Lewis is respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade ... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."

Early life

Lewis was born February 7, 1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to Edwin J. Lewis, a physician of Welsh descent, and Emma Kermott Lewis. He had two older siblings, Fred (born 1875) and Claude (born 1878). His father was a stern disciplinarian, who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis's mother died in 1891. The next year Edwin married Isabel Warner, who young Lewis apparently liked. Lewis began reading books while young, and kept a diary. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly child—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble making friends and pined after local girls. At the age of 13, he ran away from home and unsuccessfully tried to become a drummer boy in the Spanish–American War. In late 1902, Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy (the then-preparatory department of Oberlin College) to qualify for acceptance at Yale University. While at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. Lewis later became an atheist. He entered Yale in 1903, but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, taking time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis's undistinguished looks, country manners and seeming self-importance made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale. He did make a few friends among the students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer.

Career

Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, writing fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. In the summer of 1908, Lewis worked as an editorial writer at a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa. He moved to the Carmel-by-the-Sea writers' colony near Monterrey, California, in September 1908, to work for the MacGowan sisters and to meet poet George Sterling in person. He left Carmel after six months, moving to San Francisco where Sterling helped him get a job at the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Lewis returned to Carmel in spring 1910 and met Jack London.

While working for newspapers and publishing houses he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. He also earned money by selling plots to London, including one for the latter's unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham.

Sinclair Lewis's first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.

Commercial success
Upon moving to Washington, D.C., Lewis devoted himself to writing. As early as 1916, he began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920. His biographer Mark Schorer wrote in 1961 that the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history". Lewis's agent had the most optimistic projection of sales at 25,000 copies. In its first six months, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million. Richard Lingeman wrote in 2002, "Main Street made [Lewis] rich—earning him about 3 million current dollars" (almost $5 million, as of 2022).

Lewis followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith, Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis returned in future novels, including Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Gideon Planish and Dodsworth.

Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about the challenges faced by an idealistic doctor. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined, still upset that Main Street had not won the prize. It was adapted as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman which was nominated for four Academy Awards.

Next Lewis published Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted an evangelical minister as deeply hypocritical. The novel was denounced by many religious leaders and banned in some U.S. cities. It was adapted for the screen more than a generation later as the basis of the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster, who earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the title role. The film won two more awards as well.

Lewis next published Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society. He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of great wealth and advantages. The book was adapted for the Broadway stage in 1934 by Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film version directed by William Wyler, which was a great success at the time. The film is still highly regarded; in 1990, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, and in 2005 Time magazine named it one of the "100 Best Movies" of the past 80 years.

During the late 1920s and 1930s, Lewis wrote many short stories for a variety of magazines and publications. "Little Bear Bongo" (1930) is a tale about a bear cub who wants to escape the circus in search of a better life in the real world, first published in Cosmopolitan magazine. The story was acquired by Walt Disney Pictures in 1940 for a possible feature film. World War II sidetracked those plans until 1947. Disney used the story (now titled "Bongo") as part of its feature Fun and Fancy Free.

Nobel Prize
In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive the award, after he had been nominated by Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy. In the academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us—not readers alone, but even writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today." He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

Later years

After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis wrote eleven more novels, ten of which appeared in his lifetime. The best remembered is It Can't Happen Here (1935), a novel about the election of a fascist to the American presidency.

After praising Dreiser as "pioneering", that he "more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life" in his Nobel Lecture in December 1930, in March 1931 Lewis publicly accused Dreiser of plagiarizing a book by Dorothy Thompson, Lewis's wife, which led to a well-publicized fight, wherein Dreiser repeatedly slapped Lewis. Thompson initially made the accusation in 1928 regarding her work "The New Russia" and Dreiser's "Dreiser Goes to Russia", though The New York Times also linked the dispute to competition between Dreiser and Lewis over the Nobel Prize. Dreiser fired back that Sinclair's 1925 novel Arrowsmith (adapted later that year as a feature film) was unoriginal and that Dreiser himself was first approached to write it, which was disputed by the wife of Arrowsmith 's subject, microbiologist Dr. Paul de Kruif. The feud carried on for some months. In 1944, Lewis campaigned to have Dreiser recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

After an alcoholic binge in 1937, Lewis checked in for treatment to the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His doctors gave him a blunt assessment that he needed to decide "whether he was going to live without alcohol or die by it, one or the other." Lewis checked out after ten days, lacking any "fundamental understanding of his problem", as one of his physicians wrote to a colleague.

In the autumn of 1940, Lewis visited his old acquaintance, William Ellery Leonard, in Madison, Wisconsin. Leonard arranged a meeting with the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a tour of the campus. Lewis immediately became enthralled with the university and the city and offered to remain and teach a course in creative writing in the upcoming semester. For a month he was quite enamored of his professorial role. Suddenly, on November 7, after giving only five classes to his select group of 24 students, he announced that he had taught them all that he knew. He left Madison the next day.

In the 1940s, Lewis and rabbi-turned-popular-author Lewis Browne frequently appeared on the lecture platform together, touring the United States and debating before audiences of as many as 3,000 people, addressing such questions as "Has the Modern Woman Made Good?", "The Country Versus the City", "Is the Machine Age Wrecking Civilization?", and "Can Fascism Happen Here?". The pair were described as "the Gallagher and Shean of the lecture circuit" by Lewis biographer Richard Lingeman.

In the early 1940s, Lewis lived in Duluth, Minnesota. During this time, he wrote the novel Kingsblood Royal (1947), set in the fictional city of Grand Republic, Minnesota, an enlarged and updated version of Zenith. It is based on the Sweet Trials in Detroit in which an African-American doctor was denied the chance to purchase a house in a "white" section of the city. Lewis' creation of the novel was preceded by his introduction to the black community via Edward Francis Murphy, a Josephite priest with whom he had attended school as a child. Kingsblood was a powerful and very early contribution to the civil rights movement.

In 1943, Lewis went to Hollywood to work on a script with Dore Schary, who had just resigned as executive head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's low-budget film department to concentrate on writing and producing his own films. The resulting screenplay was Storm In the West, "a traditional American western" — except for the fact that it was also an allegory of World War II, with primary villain Hygatt (Hitler) and his henchmen Gribbles (Goebbels) and Gerrett (Goering) plotting to take over the Franson Ranch, the Poling Ranch, and so on. The screenplay was deemed too political by MGM studio executives and was shelved, and the film was never made. Storm In the West was finally published in 1963, with a foreword by Schary detailing the work's origins, the authors' creative process, and the screenplay's ultimate fate.

Sinclair Lewis had been a frequent visitor to Williamstown, Massachusetts. In 1946, he rented Thorvale Farm on Oblong Road. While working on his novel Kingsblood Royal, he purchased this summer estate and upgraded the Georgian mansion along with a farmhouse and many outbuildings. By 1948, Lewis had created a gentleman's farm consisting of 720 acre of agricultural and forest land. His intended residence in Williamstown was short-lived because of his medical problems.

Personal life
In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger (1887–1981), an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis (1917–1944), named after British author H. G. Wells. Serving as a U.S. Army lieutenant during World War II, Wells Lewis was killed in action on October 29, 1944 amid Allied efforts to rescue the "Lost Battalion" in France. Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State, was a neighbor and family friend in Washington, and observed that Sinclair's literary "success was not good for that marriage, or for either of the parties to it, or for Lewis's work" and the family moved out of town.

Lewis divorced Grace on April 16, 1925. On May 14, 1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist. Later in 1928, he and Dorothy purchased a second home in rural Vermont. They had a son, Michael Lewis (1930–1975), who became a stage actor. Their marriage had virtually ended by 1937, and they divorced in 1942.

Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism, on January 10, 1951, aged 65. His body was cremated and his remains were buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His final novel World So Wide (1951) was published posthumously.

William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, argued that Lewis did not die from alcoholism. He reported that Lewis had a heart attack and that his doctors advised him to stop drinking if he wanted to live. Lewis did not stop, and perhaps could not; he died when his heart stopped.

In summarizing Lewis's career, Shirer stated: "It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to ... Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner ... Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life ... was greater than all of the other four writers together."

Legacy
Compared to his contemporaries, Lewis's reputation suffered a precipitous decline among literary scholars throughout the 20th century. Despite his enormous popularity during the 1920s, by the 21st century most of his works had been eclipsed in prominence by other writers with less commercial success during the same time period, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Since the 2010s there has been renewed interest in Lewis's work, in particular his 1935 dystopian satire It Can't Happen Here. In the aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election, It Can't Happen Here surged to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling books. Scholars have found parallels in his novels to the COVID-19 crisis, and to the rise of Donald Trump.

He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series. In 1960 Polish American sculptor Joseph Kiselewski was commissioned to create a bust of Lewis, now in the Great River Regional public library in Sauk Centre, MN.

Novels
Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, June 7, June 14 and 21, 1919 Excerpted in Hearst's International, October 1922 Serialized in Collier's, February 20, March 20 and April 24, 1926 Serialized in Redbook, August, November and December 1932 Appeared in Cosmopolitan, July 1945.
 * 1912: Hike and the Aeroplane (juvenile, as Tom Graham)
 * 1914: Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man
 * 1915: The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
 * 1917: The Job
 * 1917: The Innocents: A Story for Lovers
 * 1919: Free Air
 * 1920: Main Street
 * 1922: Babbitt
 * 1925: Arrowsmith
 * 1926: Mantrap
 * 1927: Elmer Gantry
 * 1928: The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen
 * 1929: Dodsworth
 * 1933: Ann Vickers
 * 1934: Work of Art
 * 1935: It Can't Happen Here
 * 1938: The Prodigal Parents
 * 1940: Bethel Merriday
 * 1943: Gideon Planish
 * 1945: Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives
 * 1947: Kingsblood Royal
 * 1949: The God-Seeker
 * 1951: World So Wide (posthumous)

Babbitt, Mantrap and Cass Timberlane were published as Armed Services Editions during WWII.

Short stories
Adapted for the silent film The Ghost Patrol (1923) Adapted for the animated feature film Fun and Fancy Free (1947) Serialized in Good Housekeeping, August, September 1943 ISBN 978-1523653508(novella)
 * 1907: "That Passage in Isaiah", The Blue Mule, May 1907
 * 1907: "Art and the Woman", The Gray Goose, June 1907
 * 1911: "The Way to Rome", The Bellman, May 13, 1911
 * 1915: "Commutation: $9.17", The Saturday Evening Post, October 30, 1915
 * 1915: "The Other Side of the House", The Saturday Evening Post, November 27, 1915
 * 1916: "If I Were Boss", The Saturday Evening Post, January 1 and 8, 1916
 * 1916: "I'm a Stranger Here Myself", The Smart Set, August 1916
 * 1916: "He Loved His Country", Everybody's Magazine, October 1916
 * 1916: "Honestly If Possible", The Saturday Evening Post, October 14, 191
 * 1917: "Twenty-Four Hours in June", The Saturday Evening Post, February 17, 1917
 * 1917: "The Innocents", Woman's Home Companion, March 1917
 * 1917: "A Story with a Happy Ending", The Saturday Evening Post, March 17, 1917
 * 1917: "Hobohemia", The Saturday Evening Post, April 7, 1917
 * 1917: "The Ghost Patrol", The Red Book Magazine, June 1917
 * 1917: "Young Man Axelbrod", The Century, June 1917
 * 1917: "A Woman by Candlelight", The Saturday Evening Post, July 28, 1917
 * 1917: "The Whisperer", The Saturday Evening Post, August 11, 1917
 * 1917: "The Hidden People", Good Housekeeping, September 1917
 * 1917: "Joy-Joy", The Saturday Evening Post, October 20, 1917
 * 1918: "A Rose for Little Eva", McClure's, February 1918
 * 1918: "Slip It to 'Em", Metropolitan Magazine, March 1918
 * 1918: "An Invitation to Tea", Every Week, June 1, 1918
 * 1918: "The Shadowy Glass", The Saturday Evening Post, June 22, 1918
 * 1918: "The Willow Walk", The Saturday Evening Post, August 10, 1918
 * 1918: "Getting His Bit", Metropolitan Magazine, September 1918
 * 1918: "The Swept Hearth", The Saturday Evening Post, September 21, 1918
 * 1918: "Jazz", Metropolitan Magazine, October 1918
 * 1918: "Gladvertising", The Popular Magazine, October 7, 1918
 * 1919: "Moths in the Arc Light", The Saturday Evening Post, January 11, 1919
 * 1919: "The Shrinking Violet", The Saturday Evening Post, February 15, 1919
 * 1919: "Things", The Saturday Evening Post, February 22, 1919
 * 1919: "The Cat of the Stars", The Saturday Evening Post, April 19, 1919
 * 1919: "The Watcher Across the Road", The Saturday Evening Post, May 24, 1919
 * 1919: "Speed", The Red Book Magazine, June 1919
 * 1919: "The Shrimp-Colored Blouse", The Red Book Magazine, August 1919
 * 1919: "The Enchanted Hour", The Saturday Evening Post, August 9, 1919
 * 1919: "Danger—Run Slow", The Saturday Evening Post, October 18 and 25, 1919
 * 1919: "Bronze Bars", The Saturday Evening Post, December 13, 1919
 * 1920: "Habaes Corpus", The Saturday Evening Post, January 24, 1920
 * 1920: "Way I See It", The Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1920
 * 1920: "The Good Sport", The Saturday Evening Post, December 11, 1920
 * 1921: "A Matter of Business", Harper's, March 1921
 * 1921: "Number Seven to Sagapoose", The American Magazine, May 1921
 * 1921: "The Post-Mortem Murder", The Century, May 1921
 * 1923: "The Hack Driver", The Nation, August 29, 1923
 * 1929: "He Had a Brother", Cosmopolitan, May 1929
 * 1929: "There Was a Prince", Cosmopolitan, June 1929
 * 1929: "Elizabeth, Kitty and Jane", Cosmopolitan, July 1929
 * 1929: "Dear Editor", Cosmopolitan, August 1929
 * 1929: "What a Man!", Cosmopolitan, September 1929
 * 1929: "Keep Out of the Kitchen", Cosmopolitan, October 1929
 * 1929: "A Letter from the Queen", Cosmopolitan, December 1929
 * 1930: "Youth", Cosmopolitan, February 1930
 * 1930: "Noble Experiment", Cosmopolitan, August 1930
 * 1930: "Little Bear Bongo", Cosmopolitan, September 1930
 * 1930: "Go East, Young Man", Cosmopolitan, December 1930
 * 1931: "Let's Play King", Cosmopolitan, January, February and March 1931
 * 1931: "Pajamas", Redbook, April 1931
 * 1931: "Ring Around a Rosy", The Saturday Evening Post, June 6, 1931
 * 1931: "City of Mercy", Cosmopolitan, July 1931
 * 1931: "Land", The Saturday Evening Post, September 12, 1931
 * 1931: "Dollar Chasers", The Saturday Evening Post, October 17 and 24, 1931
 * 1935: "The Hippocratic Oath", Cosmopolitan, June 1935
 * 1935: "Proper Gander", The Saturday Evening Post, July 13, 1935
 * 1935: "Onward, Sons of Ingersoll!", Scribner's, August 1935
 * 1936: "From the Queen", Argosy, February 1936
 * 1941: "The Man Who Cheated Time", Good Housekeeping, March 1941
 * 1941: "Manhattan Madness", The American Magazine, September 1941
 * 1941: "They Had Magic Then!", Liberty, September 6, 1941
 * 1943: "All Wives Are Angels", Cosmopolitan, February 1943
 * 1943: "Nobody to Write About", Cosmopolitan, July 1943
 * 1943: "Green Eyes—A Handbook of Jealousy", Cosmopolitan, September and October 1943
 * 1943: Harri

The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949)
Samuel J. Rogal edited The Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis (1904–1949), a seven-volume set published in 2007 by Edwin Mellen Press. The first attempt to collect all of Lewis's short stories.

 * Volume 1 (June 1904 – January 1916) ISBN 9780773454873
 * Volume 2 (August 1916 – October 1917) ISBN 9780773454897
 * Volume 3 (January 1918 – February 1919) ISBN 9780773454910
 * Volume 4 (February 1919 – May 1921) ISBN 9780773454194
 * Volume 5 (August 1923 – April 1931) ISBN 9780773453562
 * Volume 6 (June 1931 – March 1941) ISBN 9780773453067
 * Volume 7 (September 1941 – May 1949) ISBN 9780773452763

Articles

 * 1915: "Nature, Inc.", The Saturday Evening Post, October 2, 1915
 * 1917: "For the Zelda Bunch", McClure's, October 1917
 * 1918: "Spiritualist Vaudeville", Metropolitan Magazine, February 1918
 * 1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Gasoline Gypsies", The Saturday Evening Post, December 20, 1919
 * 1919: "Adventures in Autobumming: Want a Lift?", The Saturday Evening Post, December 27, 1919
 * 1920: "Adventures in Autobumming: The Great American Frying Pan", The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1920

Plays
Adapted for the feature film This Is the Life (1944)
 * 1919: Hobohemia
 * 1934: Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts (with Lloyd Lewis)
 * 1936: It Can't Happen Here (with John C. Moffitt)
 * 1938: Angela Is Twenty-Two (with Fay Wray)

Screenplay

 * 1943: Storm In the West (with Dore Schary – unproduced)

Poems

 * 1907: "The Ultra-Modern", The Smart Set, July 1907
 * 1907: "Dim Hours of Dusk", The Smart Set, August 1907
 * 1907: "Disillusion", The Smart Set, December 1907
 * 1909: "Summer in Winter", People's Magazine, February 1909
 * 1912: "A Canticle of Great Lovers", Ainslee's Magazine, July 1912

Forewords

 * 1942: Henry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait (by Paxton Hibben; publisher: The Press of the Readers Club, NY NY)

Books

 * 1915: Tennis As I Play It (ghostwritten for Maurice McLoughlin)
 * 1926: John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer
 * 1929: Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929
 * 1935: Selected Short Stories of Sinclair Lewis
 * 1952: From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930 (edited by Alfred Harcourt and Oliver Harrison)
 * 1953: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950 (edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville Cane)
 * 1962: I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories (edited by Mark Schorer)
 * 1962: Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays (edited by Mark Schorer)
 * 1985: Selected Letters of Sinclair Lewis (edited by John J. Koblas and Dave Page)
 * 1997: If I Were Boss: The Early Business Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Anthony Di Renzo)
 * 2000: Minnesota Diary, 1942–46 (edited by George Killough)
 * 2005: Go East, Young Man: Sinclair Lewis on Class in America (edited by Sally E. Parry)
 * 2005: The Minnesota Stories of Sinclair Lewis (edited by Sally E. Parry)

title: Sinclair Lewis