Word: 1780s
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...most of Alaska's history, the environment has been an afterthought on the road to exploitation. From the arrival of Russian fur trappers in the 1780s, the Last Frontier has been a rich trove of resources. Today oil and natural gas provide more than 85% of the state's revenues, along with a royalty check for nearly every one of Alaska's 686,000 residents. "Being against development here is literally the third rail of politics," says Bryce Edgmon, an Alaska state representative from Bristol...
First described in the medical literature in the 1780s, the placebo effect can work all manner of curative magic against all manner of ills. Give a patient a sugar pill but call it an analgesic, and pain may actually go away. Parkinson's disease patients who underwent a sham surgery that they were told would boost the low dopamine levels responsible for their symptoms actually experienced a dopamine bump. Newberg describes a cancer patient whose tumors shrank when he was given an experimental drug, grew back when he learned that the drug was ineffective in other patients and shrank again...
CONTEXT Much like an oil spill, rat spills can wreak havoc on delicate ecosystems and are a major problem for many far-flung islands. One of Alaska's western Aleutians was even named Rat Island after it was overrun by the critters following a shipwreck in the 1780s...
...Macleay and his fellow naturalists were just as excited when Australia's bizarre flora and fauna began arriving in London in the 1780s. The stunning variety, wrote a contemporary, "bursts upon our view at the first glance like a new creation." When Macleay agreed to go out to New South Wales as colonial secretary in 1826, his sole consolation for being sent to that era's equivalent of the moon was that he'd find it easier there to feed the addiction that threatened to ruin him: collecting insects from the antipodes. In an exquisite introductory essay, Ashley Hay tells...
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams first encountered the Barbary States in the late 1780s, when they were American diplomats in Europe. They did not enjoy the experience. In 1786 they reported on a conversation with Tripoli's ambassador to Britain. He informed them that peace could be bought for 30,000 guineas (with a £3,000 tip for himself) and advised that Tunis would settle at the same rate, although he could not answer for Morocco or Algiers. This was far more than Jefferson and Adams had been authorized to spend. Jefferson had feared as much. "We ought...