Cantore arithmetic is at the preface of a pyramid is not a triangle however represented the scheme to the United States of America making national income, drugs in the headshop(as in the Haight) and packages at 18 years old the only relief to what the United States of America in all States have created. To the very least of pass the bill and find the scale is now heavier than the “weight of a feather”, convolution enters. To task the food is not a pyramid it is a square.
The four corners cannot not match a boxing match and enters the game of possibly why football is popular to the country and announces as hockey the common score to the sound of ice on Huckleberry Finn.
Cantore arithmetic has subjected the addition and will leave the cuts to Hollywood for film, all terminology to the honor and respect of the Placek Family and specific will be held to the available cross as our entry to this presentation of opportunity was recorded at our entry through the recorded signature and Placek is the name by whom represents our success to opportunity to now present the Cantore arithmetic as a program.
Information technology
 | It has been suggested that IT infrastructure be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since March 2023. |
| Information science |
|---|
| General aspects |
| Related fields and subfields |
Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve and exchange all kinds of data[1] and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT).[2] An information technology system (IT system) is generally an information system, a communications system, or, more specifically speaking, a computer system — including all hardware, software, and peripheralequipment — operated by a limited group of IT users, and an IT project usually refers to the commissioning and implementation of an IT system.[3]
Although humans have been storing, retrieving, manipulating, and communicating information since the earliest writing systems were developed,[4] the term information technology in its modern sense first appeared in a 1958 article published in the Harvard Business Review; authors Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler commented that "the new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology (IT)."[5] Their definition consists of three categories: techniques for processing, the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making, and the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs.[5]
The term is commonly used as a synonym for computers and computer networks, but it also encompasses other information distribution technologies such as television and telephones. Several products or services within an economy are associated with information technology, including computer hardware, software, electronics, semiconductors, internet, telecom equipment, and e-commerce.[6][a]
Based on the storage and processing technologies employed, it is possible to distinguish four distinct phases of IT development: pre-mechanical (3000 BC — 1450 AD), mechanical (1450—1840), electromechanical (1840—1940), and electronic (1940 to present).[4]
Information technology is also a branch of computer science, which can be defined as the overall study of procedure, structure, and the processing of various types of data. As this field continues to evolve across the world, the overall priority and importance has also grown, which is where we begin to see the introduction of computer science-related courses in K-12 education.
History[edit]
Ideas of computer science were first mentioned before the 1950s under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, where they had discussed and began thinking of computer circuits and numerical calculations. As time went on, the field of information technology and computer science became more complex and was able to handle the processing of more data. Scholarly articles began to be published from different organizations.[8]
Looking at early computing, Alan Turing, J. Presper Eckert, and John Mauchly were considered to be some of the major pioneers of computer technology in the mid-1900s. Giving them such credit for their developments, most of their efforts were focused on designing the first digital computer. Along with that, topics such as artificial intelligence began to be brought up as Turing was beginning to question such technology of the time period.[9]
Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, probably initially in the form of a tally stick.[10] The Antikythera mechanism, dating from about the beginning of the first century BC, is generally considered to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer, and the earliest known geared mechanism.[11] Comparable geared devices did not emerge in Europe until the 16th century, and it was not until 1645 that the first mechanical calculator capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations was developed.[12]
Electronic computers, using either relays or valves, began to appear in the early 1940s. The electromechanicalZuse Z3, completed in 1941, was the world's first programmable computer, and by modern standards one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine. During the Second World War, Colossusdeveloped the first electronic digital computer to decrypt German messages. Although it was programmable, it was not general-purpose, being designed to perform only a single task. It also lacked the ability to store its program in memory; programming was carried out using plugs and switches to alter the internal wiring.[13] The first recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the Manchester Baby, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948.[14]
The development of transistors in the late 1940s at Bell Laboratories allowed a new generation of computers to be designed with greatly reduced power consumption. The first commercially available stored-program computer, the Ferranti Mark I, contained 4050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. By comparison, the first transistorized computer developed at the University of Manchester and operational by November 1953, consumed only 150 watts in its final version.[15]
Several other breakthroughs in semiconductor technology include the integrated circuit (IC) invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyceat Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Laboratories in 1959, and the microprocessor invented by Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin, Masatoshi Shima, and Stanley Mazor at Intel in 1971. These important inventions led to the development of the personal computer (PC) in the 1970s, and the emergence of information and communications technology (ICT).[16]
By the year of 1984, according to the National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review, the term information technology had been redefined as "The development of cable television was made possible by the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (…generally known in Britain as information technology)." We then begin to see the appearance of the term in 1990 contained within documents for the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).[17]
Innovations in technology have already revolutionized the world by the twenty-first century as people were able to access different online services. This has changed the workforce drastically as thirty percent of U.S. workers were already in careers in this profession. 136.9 million people were personally connected to the Internet, which was equivalent to 51 million households.[18] Along with the Internet, new types of technology were also being introduced across the globe, which has improved efficiency and made things easier across the globe.
Along with technology revolutionizing society, millions of processes could be done in seconds. Innovations in communication were also crucial as people began to rely on the computer to communicate through telephone lines and cable. The introduction of the email was considered revolutionary as "companies in one part of the world could communicate by e-mail with suppliers and buyers in another part of the world..."[19]
Not only personally, computers and technology have also revolutionized the marketing industry, resulting in more buyers of their products. During the year of 2002, Americans exceeded $28 billion in goods just over the Internet alone while e-commerce a decade later resulted in $289 billion in sales.[19] And as computers are rapidly becoming more sophisticated by the day, they are becoming more used as people are becoming more reliant on them during the twenty-first century.
Data processing[edit]
Storage[edit]
Early electronic computers such as Colossus made use of punched tape, a long strip of paper on which data was represented by a series of holes, a technology now obsolete.[20] Electronic data storage, which is used in modern computers, dates from World War II, when a form of delay-line memory was developed to remove the clutter from radar signals, the first practical application of which was the mercury delay line.[21] The first random-access digital storage device was the Williams tube, which was based on a standard cathode ray tube.[22] However, the information stored in it and delay-line memory was volatile in the fact that it had to be continuously refreshed, and thus was lost once power was removed. The earliest form of non-volatile computer storage was the magnetic drum, invented in 1932[23] and used in the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer.[24]
IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system.[25]: 6 Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs.[26]: 4–5 Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007, almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally:[27] 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices, and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007,[28] doubling roughly every 3 years.[29]
Databases[edit]
Database Management Systems (DMS) emerged in the 1960s to address the problem of storing and retrieving large amounts of data accurately and quickly. An early such system was IBM's Information Management System (IMS),[30] which is still widely deployed more than 50 years later.[31] IMS stores data hierarchically,[30] but in the 1970s Ted Codd proposed an alternative relational storage model based on set theory and predicate logic and the familiar concepts of tables, rows, and columns. In 1981, the first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS) was released by Oracle.[32]
All DMS consist of components, they allow the data they store to be accessed simultaneously by many users while maintaining its integrity.[33] All databases are common in one point that the structure of the data they contain is defined and stored separately from the data itself, in a database schema.[30]
In recent years, the extensible markup language (XML) has become a popular format for data representation. Although XML data can be stored in normal file systems, it is commonly held in relational databases to take advantage of their "robust implementation verified by years of both theoretical and practical effort."[34] As an evolution of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), XML's text-based structure offers the advantage of being both machine-and human-readable.[35]
Transmission[edit]
Data transmission has three aspects: transmission, propagation, and reception.[36] It can be broadly categorized as broadcasting, in which information is transmitted unidirectionally downstream, or telecommunications, with bidirectional upstream and downstream channels.[28]
XML has been increasingly employed as a means of data interchange since the early 2000s,[37] particularly for machine-oriented interactions such as those involved in web-oriented protocols such as SOAP,[35] describing "data-in-transit rather than... data-at-rest".[37]
Manipulation[edit]
Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law): machines' application-specific capacity to compute information per capita roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986 and 2007; the per capita capacity of the world's general-purpose computers doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the world's storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled every 12.3 years.[28]
Massive amounts of data are stored worldwide every day, but unless it can be analyzed and presented effectively it essentially resides in what have been called data tombs: "data archives that are seldom visited".[38] To address that issue, the field of data mining — "the process of discovering interesting patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data"[39] — emerged in the late 1980s.[40]
Services[edit]
Email[edit]
The technology and services it provides for sending and receiving electronic messages (called "letters" or "electronic letters") over a distributed (including global) computer network. In terms of the composition of elements and the principle of operation, electronic mail practically repeats the system of regular (paper) mail, borrowing both terms (mail, letter, envelope, attachment, box, delivery, and others) and characteristic features — ease of use, message transmission delays, sufficient reliability and at the same time no guarantee of delivery. The advantages of e-mail are: easily perceived and remembered by a person addresses of the form user_name@domain_name (for example, somebody@example.com); the ability to transfer both plain text and formatted, as well as arbitrary files; independence of servers (in the general case, they address each other directly); sufficiently high reliability of message delivery; ease of use by humans and programs.
Disadvantages of e-mail: the presence of such a phenomenon as spam (massive advertising and viral mailings); the theoretical impossibility of guaranteed delivery of a particular letter; possible delays in message delivery (up to several days); limits on the size of one message and on the total size of messages in the mailbox (personal for users).
Search system[edit]
A software and hardware complex with a web interface that provides the ability to search for information on the Internet. A search engine usually means a site that hosts the interface (front-end) of the system. The software part of a search engine is a search engine (search engine) — a set of programs that provides the functionality of a search engine and is usually a trade secret of the search engine developer company. Most search engines look for information on World Wide Web sites, but there are also systems that can look for files on FTP servers, items in online stores, and information on Usenet newsgroups. Improving search is one of the priorities of the modern Internet (see the Deep Web article about the main problems in the work of search engines).
Commercial effects[edit]
Companies in the information technology field are often discussed as a group as the "tech sector" or the "tech industry."[41][42][43] These titles can be misleading at times and should not be mistaken for "tech companies;" which are generally large scale, for-profit corporations that sell consumer technology and software. It is also worth noting that from a business perspective, Information technology departments are a "cost center" the majority of the time. A cost center is a department or staff which incurs expenses, or "costs," within a company rather than generating profits or revenue streams. Modern businesses rely heavily on technology for their day-to-day operations, so the expenses delegated to cover technology that facilitates business in a more efficient manner are usually seen as "just the cost of doing business." IT departments are allocated funds by senior leadership and must attempt to achieve the desired deliverables while staying within that budget. Government and the private sector might have different funding mechanisms, but the principles are more-or-less the same. This is an often overlooked reason for the rapid interest in automation and Artificial Intelligence, but the constant pressure to do more with less is opening the door for automation to take control of at least some minor operations in large companies.
Many companies now have IT departments for managing the computers, networks, and other technical areas of their businesses. Companies have also sought to integrate IT with business outcomes and decision-making through a BizOps or business operations department.[44]
In a business context, the Information Technology Association of America has defined information technology as "the study, design, development, application, implementation, support, or management of computer-based information systems".[45][page needed] The responsibilities of those working in the field include network administration, software development and installation, and the planning and management of an organization's technology life cycle, by which hardware and software are maintained, upgraded, and replaced.
Information services[edit]
Information services is a term somewhat loosely applied to a variety of IT-related services offered by commercial companies,[46][47][48] as well as data brokers.
![U.S. Employment distribution of computer systems design and related services, 2011[49]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputerSystemsEmployment_distribution_.png)
![U.S. Employment in the computer systems and design related services industry, in thousands, 1990-2011[49]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EmploymentComputerSystems.png)
![U.S. Occupational growth and wages in computer systems design and related services, 2010-2020[49]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ComputerSystemsOccupationalGrowthWages.png){kind=small}
![U.S. projected percent change in employment in selected occupations in computer systems design and related services, 2010-2020[49]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProjectedEmploymentChangeComputerSystems.png)
![U.S. projected average annual percent change in output and employment in selected industries, 2010-2020[49]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ProjectedAverageAnnualEmploymentChangeSelectedIndustries.png)
Ethics[edit]
The field of information ethics was established by mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s.[50]: 9 Some of the ethical issues associated with the use of information technology include:[51]: 20–21
- Breaches of copyright by those downloading files stored without the permission of the copyright holders
- Employers monitoring their employees' emails and other Internet usage
- Unsolicited emails
- Hackers accessing online databases
- Web sites installing cookies or spyware to monitor a user's online activities, which may be used by data brokers
IT projects[edit]
Research suggests that IT projects in business and public administration can easily become significant in scale. Work conducted by McKinsey in collaboration with the University of Oxford suggested that half of all large-scale IT projects (those with initial cost estimates of $15 million or more) often failed to maintain costs within their initial budgets or to complete on time.[52]
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ^ On the later more broad application of the term IT, Keary comments: "In its original application 'information technology' was appropriate to describe the convergence of technologies with application in the vast field of data storage, retrieval, processing, and dissemination. This useful conceptual term has since been converted to what purports to be of great use, but without the reinforcement of definition ... the term IT lacks substance when applied to the name of any function, discipline, or position."[7]
Weighing of souls
The weighing of souls (Ancient Greek: psychostasia)[1] is a religious motif in which a person's life is assessed by weighing their soul (or some other part of them) immediately before or after death in order to judge their fate.[2]This motif is most commonly seen in medieval Christianity.[3]
Ancient Egyptian religion[edit]
In Egypt, this concept of a judgement after death to determine the fate of the deceased is first seen in the Old Kingdom around 2400 B.C.E. It was first imagined as a weighing in the Coffin Texts during the Middle Kingdom(2160-1580 B.C.E.). The most well known form of the ceremony, where people's hearts are weighed on a scaleagainst a feather, is found in the Book of the Dead during the New Kingdom (1580-1090 B.C.E).[2]
The Weighing of the Heart would take place in Duat (the Underworld), in which the dead were judged by Anubis, using a feather, representing Ma'at, the goddess of truth and justice responsible for maintaining order in the universe. The heart was the seat of the life-spirit (ka). Hearts heavier than the feather of Ma'at were rejected and eaten by Ammit, the Devourer of Souls.
Among the Greeks[edit]
Later, during the contest of Achilles and Hector in the Iliad,[4] Zeus, weary from the battle, hung up his golden scales and in them set twin Keres, "two fateful portions of death"; this, then, is known as the kerostasia.[5][3]Plutarch reports that Aeschylus wrote a play with the title Psychostasia, in which the combatants were Achilles and Memnon.[6] This tradition was maintained among the vase painters. An early representation is found on a black-figure lekythos in the British Museum;[7]she observes "The Keres or ψυχαί are represented as miniature men; it is the lives rather than the fates that are weighed. So the notion shifts." In a psychostasia on an Athenian red-figure vase of about 460 BCE at the Louvre, the fates of Achilles and Memnon are in the balance held by Hermes.[8]Among later Greek writers the psychostasia was the prerogative of Minos, judge of the newly deceased in Hades.
Christianity[edit]
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The first known depiction of literal weighing of souls in Christianity is from the 2nd century Testament of Abraham.[10]
Archangel Michael is the one who is most commonly shown weighing the souls of people on scales on Judgement Day.[9] This depiction began to show up in early Christianity, but is not mentioned in the Bible.[9]
Demons are often depicted trying to interfere with the balance of the scales.[11]
Other[edit]
In the literature of the Mandaeans, Abatur, an angelic being, has the responsibility of weighing the souls of the deceased to determine their worthiness, using a
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
 2nd (1st US) edition book cover | |
| Author | Mark Twain |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | E. W. Kemble |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Tom Sawyer |
| Genre | Picaresque novel |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus / Charles L. Webster And Company. |
Publication date | December 10, 1884 (UK and Canada) 1885[1] (United States) |
| Pages | 362 |
| OCLC | 29489461 |
| Preceded by | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
| Followed by | Tom Sawyer Abroad |
| Text | Adventures of Huckleberry Finnat Wikisource |
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.
Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, the narrator of two other Twain novels (Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective) and a friend of Tom Sawyer. It is a direct sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The book is noted for "changing the course of children's literature" in the United States for the "deeply felt portrayal of boyhood".[2][better source needed] It is also known for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist over 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism and freedom.
Perennially popular with readers, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication. The book was widely criticized upon release because of its extensive use of coarse language and racial epithet. Throughout the 20th century, and despite arguments that the protagonist and the tenor of the book are anti-racist,[3][4] criticism of the book continued due to both its perceived use of racial stereotypes and its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger".
Plot[edit]
In St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the shore of the Mississippi River, during the 1830s–1840s, Huckleberry "Huck" Finn has come into a considerable sum of money following The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and is placed under the strict guardianship of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. The women attempt to civilize him, but Huck prefers to have adventures with his friend Tom Sawyer. His father, "Pap", an abusive alcoholic, returns to town and tries to appropriate Huck's fortune. When this fails, Pap kidnaps Huck and imprisons him in a cabin in the woods.
To escape his father, Huck elaborately fakes his own murder and sets off downriver. He settles on Jackson's Island, where he reunites with Miss Watson's slave Jim, who ran away after overhearing she was planning to sell him. Huck decides to go downriver with Jim to Cairo, in the free state of Illinois. After heavy flooding, the two find a timber raft and an entire house floating down the river. Inside, Jim finds a body that has been shot to death but prevents Huck from viewing the corpse.[5] Huck sneaks into town and discovers there is a reward out for Jim, who is suspected of killing Huck; the two flee on their raft.
Huck and Jim come across a grounded steamer, the Walter Scott, where two thieves are discussing murdering a third. Finding that their own raft has drifted away, Huck and Jim flee in the thieves' boat before being noticed. They find their own raft again and sink the thieves' boat, keeping their loot. Huck tricks a watchman into going to rescue the stranded thieves to assuage his conscience. Huck and Jim are separated in a fog, and when they reunite, Huck tricks Jim into thinking he dreamed the entire incident. Jim is disappointed when Huck admits the truth. Huck is surprised by Jim's strong feelings and apologizes.
Huck is conflicted about supporting a runaway slave, which he has been taught is a sin. He decides to turn Jim in, but when two white men seeking runaway slaves come upon the raft, he lies to them and they leave. Jim and Huck realize they have passed Cairo. With no way of getting back upriver, they decide to continue downriver. The raft is struck by a passing steamship, again separating the two.
On the riverbank, Huck meets the Grangerford family, who are engaged in a 30-year blood feud with the Shepherdson family, although no one remembers why the feud originally started. After a Grangerford daughter elopes with a Shepherdson boy, the feud boils over and all the Grangerford males are shot and killed in a Shepherdson ambush. Huck escapes and is reunited with Jim, who has recovered and repaired the raft.
Downriver, Jim and Huck are joined by two confidence men claiming to be a King and a Duke. The swindlers rope Huck and Jim into playing along with a series of scams. In one town, the swindlers scam the townsfolk with a short and overpriced performance. On the third night, the grifters flee before the townsfolk can take revenge. In the next town, the swindlers impersonate brothers of recently-deceased Peter Wilks to steal his estate. Huck tries to retrieve the money for Wilks's orphaned nieces. Two men claiming to be Wilks' real brothers arrive, causing an uproar. Huck tries to flee in the confusion, but is caught by the grifters. Eventually he escapes, but finds that the swindlers have sold Jim to the Phelps family plantation. Huck vows to free Jim, despite believing he will go to hell as a consequence.
The Phelps family mistakes Huck for their nephew Tom, who is expected for a visit, and Huck plays along. It turns out their nephew is Tom Sawyer. When he arrives, he plays along with Huck's story and develops a theatrical plan to free Jim. During the escape, Tom is wounded. Jim tends to him instead of escaping, and is arrested and returned to the plantation.[6] Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and reveals the boys' true identities. She explains that Miss Watson has died, freeing Jim in her will. Tom admits he knew this, but wanted to "rescue" Jim in style.[7] Jim says that Huck's father was the dead man they found in the floating house, so Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. Huck declares that he intends to flee west to Indian Territory to escape being adopted by the Phelps family.
Characters[edit]
In order of appearance:
- Tom Sawyer is Huck's best friend and peer, the main character of other Twain novels and the leader of the town boys in adventures. He is mischievous, good hearted, and "the best fighter and the smartest kid in town".[8]
- Huckleberry Finn, "Huck" to his friends, is a boy about "thirteen or fourteen or along there" years old. (Chapter 17) He has been brought up by his father, the town drunk, and has a difficult time fitting into society. In the novel, Huck's good nature offers a contrast to the inadequacies and inequalities in society.
- Widow Douglas is the kind woman who takes Huck in after he helped save her from a violent home invasion. She tries her best to "sivilize" (civilize) Huck, believing it is her Christian duty to do so.
- Miss Watson is the widow's sister, a tough old spinster who also lives with them. She is fairly hard on Huck, causing him to resent her a good deal. Mark Twain may have drawn inspiration for this character from several people he knew in his life.[8]
- Jim is Miss Watson's physically large but mild-mannered slave. Huck becomes very close to Jim when they reunite after Jim flees Miss Watson's household to seek refuge from slavery, and Huck and Jim become fellow travelers on the Mississippi River. Jim is shown to be honorable, perceptive, and intelligent, despite his lack of education and prejudice he faces.
- "Pap" Finn is Huck's father, a brutal alcoholic drifter. He resents Huck getting any kind of education. His only genuine interest in his son involves begging or extorting money to feed his alcohol addiction.
- Judith Loftus plays a small part in the novel — being the kind and perceptive woman whom Huck talks to in order to find out about the search for Jim — but many critics believe her to be the best drawn female character in the novel.[8]
- The Grangerfords, an aristocratic Kentuckian family headed by the sexagenarian Colonel Saul Grangerford, take Huck in after he is separated from Jim on the Mississippi. Huck becomes close friends with the youngest male of the family, Buck Grangerford, who is Huck's age. By the time Huck meets them, the Grangerfords have been engaged in an age-old blood feud with another local family, the Shepherdsons.
- The Duke and the King are two otherwise unnamed con artists whom Huck and Jim take aboard their raft just before the start of their Arkansas adventures. They pose as the long-lost Duke of Bridgewater and the long-dead Louis XVII of France in an attempt to over-awe Huck and Jim, who quickly come to recognize them for what they are, but cynically pretend to accept their claims to avoid conflict.
- Doctor Robinson is the only man who recognizes that the King and Duke are phonies when they pretend to be British. He warns the townspeople, but they ignore him.
- Mary Jane, Joanna, and Susan Wilks are the three young nieces of their wealthy guardian, Peter Wilks, who has recently died. The Duke and the King try to steal their inheritance by posing as Peter's estranged brothers from England but are eventually thwarted.
- Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps buy Jim from the Duke and the King. She is a loving, high-strung "farmer's wife", and he a plodding old man, both a farmer and a preacher. Huck poses as their nephew, Tom Sawyer, after he parts from the conmen. His intention is to try and help Jim escape.
Themes[edit]
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn explores themes of race and identity; what it means to be free and civilized; and the ideas of humanity and social responsibility in the changing landscape of America. A complexity exists concerning Jim's character. While some scholars point out that Jim is good-hearted and moral, and he is not unintelligent (in contrast to several of the more negatively depicted white characters), others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and emphasizing the stereotypically "comic" treatment of Jim's lack of education, superstition and ignorance. This argument is supported by incidents early in the novel where Huck deliberately "tricks" Jim, taking advantage of his gullibility and Jim still remains loyal to him.[9][10]
But this novel is also Huck's 'coming of age' story where he overcomes his initial biases and forms a deeper bond with Jim. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives. Huck is unable consciously to rebut those values even in his thoughts but he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Twain, in his lecture notes, proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience" and goes on to describe the novel as "a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat".[11]
To highlight the hypocrisy required to condone slavery within an ostensibly moral system, Twain has Huck's father enslave his son, isolate him and beat him. When Huck escapes, he immediately encounters Jim "illegally" doing the same thing. The treatments both of them receive are radically different, especially in an encounter with Mrs. Judith Loftus who takes pity on who she presumes to be a runaway apprentice, Huck, yet boasts about her husband sending the hounds after a runaway slave, Jim.[12]
Some scholars discuss Huck's own character, and the novel itself, in the context of its relation to African-American culture as a whole. John Alberti quotes Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who writes in her 1990s book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, "by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery," white scholars "have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core." It is suggested that the character of Huckleberry Finn illustrates the correlation, and even interrelatedness, between white and Black culture in the United States.[13]
Illustrations[edit]
The original illustrations were done by E. W. Kemble, at the time a young artist working for Life magazine. Kemble was hand-picked by Twain, who admired his work. Hearn suggests that Twain and Kemble had a similar skill, writing that:
As Kemble could afford only one model, most of his illustrations produced for the book were done by guesswork. When the novel was published, the illustrations were praised even as the novel was harshly criticized. E.W. Kemble produced another set of illustrations for Harper's and the American Publishing Company in 1898 and 1899 after Twain lost the copyright.[15]
Publication's effect on literary climate[edit]
Twain initially conceived of the work as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that would follow Huckleberry Finn through adulthood. Beginning with a few pages he had removed from the earlier novel, Twain began work on a manuscript he originally titled Huckleberry Finn's Autobiography. Twain worked on the manuscript off and on for the next several years, ultimately abandoning his original plan of following Huck's development into adulthood. He appeared to have lost interest in the manuscript while it was in progress, and set it aside for several years. After making a trip down the Hudson River, Twain returned to his work on the novel. Upon completion, the novel's title closely paralleled its predecessor's: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade).[16]
Mark Twain composed the story in pen on notepaper between 1876 and 1883. Paul Needham, who supervised the authentication of the manuscript for Sotheby's books and manuscripts department in New York in 1991, stated, "What you see is [Clemens'] attempt to move away from pure literary writing to dialect writing". For example, Twain revised the opening line of Huck Finn three times. He initially wrote, "You will not know about me", which he changed to, "You do not know about me", before settling on the final version, "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'; but that ain't no matter."[17] The revisions also show how Twain reworked his material to strengthen the characters of Huck and Jim, as well as his sensitivity to the then-current debate over literacy and voting.[18][19]
A later version was the first typewritten manuscript delivered to a printer.[20]
Demand for the book spread outside of the United States. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was eventually published on December 10, 1884, in Canada and the United Kingdom, and on February 18, 1885, in the United States.[21] The illustration on page 283 became a point of issue after an engraver, whose identity was never discovered, made a last-minute addition to the printing plate of Kemble's picture of old Silas Phelps, which drew attention to Phelps' groin. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the obscenity was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies.[22][23]
In 1885, the Buffalo Public Library's curator, James Fraser Gluck, approached Twain to donate the manuscript to the library. Twain did so. Later it was believed that half of the pages had been misplaced by the printer. In 1991, the missing first half turned up in a steamer trunk owned by descendants of Gluck's. The library successfully claimed possession and, in 1994, opened the Mark Twain Room to showcase the treasure.[24]
In relation to the literary climate at the time of the book's publication in 1885, Henry Nash Smith describes the importance of Mark Twain's already established reputation as a "professional humorist", having already published over a dozen other works. Smith suggests that while the "dismantling of the decadent Romanticism of the later nineteenth century was a necessary operation," Adventures of Huckleberry Finn illustrated "previously inaccessible resources of imaginative power, but also made vernacular language, with its new sources of pleasure and new energy, available for American prose and poetry in the twentieth century."[25]
Critical reception and banning[edit]
While it is clear that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was controversial from the outset, Norman Mailer, writing in The New York Times in 1984, concluded that Twain's novel was not initially "too unpleasantly regarded." In fact, Mailer writes: "the critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later," reviews that would remain longstanding in the American consciousness.[26]
Alberti suggests that the academic establishment responded to the book's challenges both dismissively and with confusion. During Twain's time and today, defenders of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "lump all nonacademic critics of the book together as extremists and 'censors', thus equating the complaints about the book's 'coarseness' from the genteel bourgeois trustees of the Concord Public Library in the 1880s with more recent objections based on race and civil rights."[13]
Upon issue of the American edition in 1885, several libraries banned it from their shelves.[27] The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:
Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book's publication as well, saying that if Twain "[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them".[29][30]
In 1905, New York's Brooklyn Public Library also banned the book due to "bad word choice" and Huck's having "not only itched but scratched" within the novel, which was considered obscene. When asked by a Brooklyn librarian about the situation, Twain sardonically replied:
Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained.[32] Although Hemingway declared, "All modern American literature comes from" Huck Finn, and hailed it as "the best book we've had", he cautioned, "If you must read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys [sic]. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating."[33][34] The African-American writer Ralph Ellison argued that "Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance."[35] Pulitzer Prizewinner Ron Powers states in his Twain biography (Mark Twain: A Life) that "Huckleberry Finn endures as a consensus masterpiece despite these final chapters", in which Tom Sawyer leads Huck through elaborate machinations to rescue Jim.[36]
Controversy[edit]
In his introduction to The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, Michael Patrick Hearn writes that Twain "could be uninhibitedly vulgar", and quotes critic William Dean Howells, a Twain contemporary, who wrote that the author's "humor was not for most women". However, Hearn continues by explaining that "the reticent Howells found nothing in the proofs of Huckleberry Finn so offensive that it needed to be struck out".[37]
Racial stereotyping[edit]
Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, by humanizing Jim and exposing the fallacies of the racist assumptions of slavery, is an attack on racism.[38] Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim.[27] According to Professor Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia, Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of Black people that White readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and, therefore, resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes.[39]
In one instance, the controversy caused a drastically altered interpretation of the text: in 1955, CBS tried to avoid controversial material in a televised version of the book, by deleting all mention of slavery and omitting the character of Jim entirely.[40]
Use of the word "nigger"[edit]
Because of this controversy over whether Huckleberry Finn is racist or anti-racist, and because the word "nigger" is frequently used in the novel (a commonly used word in Twain's time that has since become vulgar and taboo), many have questioned the appropriateness of teaching the book in the U.S. public school system—this questioning of the word "nigger" is illustrated by a school administrator of Virginia in 1982 calling the novel the "most grotesque example of racism I've ever seen in my life".[41] According to the American Library Association, Huckleberry Finn was the fifth-most frequently challengedbook in the United States during the 1990s.[42]
There have been several more recent cases involving protests for the banning of the novel. In 2003, high school student Calista Phair and her grandmother, Beatrice Clark, in Renton, Washington, proposed banning the book from classroom learning in the Renton School District, though not from any public libraries, because of the word "nigger". The two curriculum committees that considered her request eventually decided to keep the novel on the 11th grade curriculum, though they suspended it until a panel had time to review the novel and set a specific teaching procedure for the novel's controversial topics.[43]
In 2009, a white Washington state high school teacher, John Foley, called for replacing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a more modern novel.[44] In an opinion column that Foley wrote in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, he states that all "novels that use the ‘N-word' repeatedly need to go." He states that teaching the novel is not only unnecessary, but difficult due to the offensive language within the novel with many students becoming uncomfortable at "just hear[ing] the N-word."[45]
In 2016, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was removed from a public school district in Virginia, along with the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, due to their use of racial slurs.[46][47]
Expurgated editions[edit]
Publishers have made their own attempts at easing the controversy by way of releasing editions of the book with the word "nigger" replaced by less controversial words. A 2011 edition of the book, published by NewSouth Books, employed the word "slave" (although the word is not properly applied to a freed man). Their argument for making the change was to offer the reader a choice of reading a "sanitized" version if they were not comfortable with the original.[48] Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben said he hoped the edition would be more friendly for use in classrooms, rather than have the work banned outright from classroom reading lists due to its language.[49]
According to publisher Suzanne La Rosa, "At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain's works will be more emphatically fulfilled."[50] Another scholar, Thomas Wortham, criticized the changes, saying the new edition "doesn't challenge children to ask, 'Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?'"[51]
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