Word: 1500s
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Dispute over the archipelago is not a new issue. The British claim to have sighted the Falklands in the late 1500s and the islands alternated between English and Spanish control until they were colonized by Argentina in 1830 after the Spanish left the area. Shortly thereafter in 1833 the British army drove off the members of the colony and hoisted the Union Jack. Argentina has never ceased to believe that it is the rightful owner of the islands and for 150 years there has been no dispute within the country concerning the legitimacy of its claim...
That the cowboy has a past at all comes as something of a revelation. He was not born in the saddle on the banks of the Red River but in Old Mexico. The grandees who first brought cattle and horses to the New World in the 1500s considered livestock tending beneath their dignity. However, the powerful padres of the Mexican mission system found the first cowboys in their congregations: Indians and Negroes. Barefoot and illiterate, these early vaqueros were often not allowed even to own the horses they rode. North of the border, cowboys were hardly better off; slaves riding...
...Galileo's time, was to house the Vatican's own astronomy laboratory, known as the Meridian Room. Here the progress of the light of the sun, on its eternal course around the earth, was measured as it entered through a slit in the wall. By the mid-1500s, the Julian calendar worked out by astronomers in Alexandria in 45 B.C. had fallen grievously into error. The spring solstices, for example, kept occurring two weeks early. So the same Vatican that denied Copernican theory used data compiled by a Jesuit in the Tower of the Winds to draw...
Sometime during his first incarnation as leader of Tibet in the late 1500s, the Dalai Lama came to a momentous decision. For the sake of Tibet, he decided to reincarnate life after life in the same human niche, as leader of his country, to preserve its spiritual welfare. Each lifetime, before he dies, the Dalai Lama gives several clues as to where his soul will next be born...
...perplexity. On a laboratory wall in the U.S. Bureau of Standards hangs a blow-up of a 16th century woodcut showing 16 men lined up heel to toe to define the rute, an old German measure of length related to the English rod. That was fine for the 1500s. But since then, each advance in technology has required better measurements. The standard meter bar, adopted by 28 nations, including the U.S.. in 1875, was considered the last word. Used with elaborate comparing devices, it could measure with an accuracy of one part in 10 million, and that seemed...