Word: 1830s
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Bravado & Bravery. The idea that portraits were history came naturally to Western Painter George Catlin. In the 1830s he resolved to assemble a pictorial record of the last golden years of the Indians freely living their own lives. He rode across hundreds of miles of unmapped prairie, visited 48 tribes and painted 600 pictures. His Indian Boy is a triumph of photographic realism blended with psychological insight. There is a trace of bravado in the boy's stance, backed by ultimate bravery in the clenched right fist. Around the eyes and mouth is the faint hint of sadness...
...African slave songs or Gregorian chants. By the 18th century, Portuguese sailors were singing the sad songs to prostitutes, who sang them to aristocrats and other opinion makers. The first great fadista was Maria Severa, a gypsy prostitute who sang in a low-life casa do fado in the 1830s. She devoted her 26 dissolute years to bed and bullfights, wine and fado, and her legend is so much with the Portuguese that fadistas still wear black shawls in mourning...
Authenticity is the watchword of the production, and director David Mills sacrifices all else to the goal of recreating the melodrama just as it was performed in the 1830s. Stylized acting, with standard gestures, asides, appeals to heaven, and so on can be entertaining if thrown into a performance as comic relief. A full play of it tends to alienate even the most hardened of audiences...
Folklore assumes that in the mind of the American Indian the Great White Father meant the President of the U.S. Not necessarily so, says John Terrell. During the 1820s and 1830s, at any rate, the Great White Father was a stumpy man with beaked nose, pursed mouth and billowing chins named John Jacob Astor...
Unlike other American tycoons, Astor apparently never developed any social ambitions. His only real interest was the fur trade, and when that dwindled, so did Astor's energies. He correctly judged in the 1830s that the boom was over (in London he had encountered "hats of silk in place of beaver"), and he retired in ill health from the business. "All your wealth will do you no good in your grave," he wrote piously to a friend. And piously in 1848 he went to his grave...