Word: 1780s
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...television program on the history of ballooning. A onetime aircraft mechanic who had long been looking for a way to escape from his homeland, Strelczyk immediately set out to build a hot-air balloon in accordance with the principles established by France's pioneering Montgolfier brothers in the 1780s. Strelczyk and his friend Wetzel built a cast-iron platform with posts at the corners for handholds and rope anchors. Four propane cooking-gas cylinders were fastened to the center. Their wives stitched up a balloon, 72 ft. in diameter, out of 60 different pieces of canvas and bedsheets, which...
Instructive Figure. He studied landscape design and was a botanist. He was also one of the first foreigners to discern, as minister to France in the 1780s, the challenging merits of new artists like Jacques Louis David and Antonio Canova. "I do not feel an interest in any pencil but that of David," he wrote in a flush of enthusiasm. Jefferson became the first American to transcend the cultural provinciality of his own land, moving with some ease between the New World and the Old. Even if he had had no political life, he would on that ground alone have...
...Massachusetts "decriminalized" fornication, substituting a fine for criminal indictment; in time even that was rarely collected. The law against missing church on Sunday was not seriously enforced after the 1780s; by the 1790s there were only half as many prosecutions a year for religious offenses as before the Revolution. The freedoms granted the non-established, unofficial churches were enlarged, culminating in the passage of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The importation of slaves was forbidden in every state but Georgia and South Carolina, and the outright abolition of slavery occurred in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont...
...very real soldier who waged a 30-years' war (1780-1810) to create an Hawaiian nation, Tregaskis leaned indulgently on legends of the sort that defy time and locale. The Polynesians had neither calendar nor alphabet before English-speaking traders started settling in the islands in the 1780s. Knowledge of Kamehameha's early career is misty, accounts of his later life were colored by success: by that time he had become a powerful King, and most of his enemies were dead...
...18th century. Concentrating on the western third of the mountainous land, the French brought in thousands of colonists, and with them came vast numbers of Negro slaves from Africa. The French called their Caribbean possession Saint Domingue, termed it the "Queen of the Antilles." So it was. In the 1780s, its foreign trade approached $140 million a year, with vast profits from sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton and indigo flowing back home. Before long, 40,000 whites were lording it over 450,000 blacks. Then one night in August 1791, the island's painfully oppressed slaves rose in bloody revolt...