Word: 1840s
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...that an honest imagination edged with poetic understanding could rescue the trading and trapping mountain men of the West from the fake-heroic fictional mold into which they had long been cast. Now in The Way West, Guthrie has irrevocably separated the covered-wagon pioneers of the 1840s from the busy, lusty book jackets and movie posters which have long held them in box-office thrall. Guthrie's humane and literate feat will have the mass of paying witnesses it deserves: The Way West, is the Book-of-the-Month Club's October selection...
...scene was older than Ottawa itself. By Ward Market had been a going concern since the 1840s, when the capital-to-be was known as Bytown,* a lusty lumbermen's town. Here in nine acres of open stalls, some 500 farmers sell their vegetables, chickens, suckling pigs, sides of mutton, raw wool, herbs, honey, eggs, cheese, flowers...
Vegetarians & Geniuses. In the Boston of the 1840s there could be found every variety of reformer, revolutionist and enthusiast: God-intoxicated Transcendentalists, fire-eating and angular Abolitionists, chest-heaving Fourierists, nutty nudists, and somber lady reformers whose figures Henry James was later aspishly to describe as having "no more outline than a bundle of hay." But in the midst of all this intellectual mooning there was great and solid achievement; this was the New England of Emerson and Hawthorne, of Thoreau, Lowell and Longfellow-the golden age of American letters...
...lesson: watch out for the jaded aristocrats of New York. Back in the 1840s, according to the evidence of Dragonwyck, one innocent Greenwich girl named Miranda (Gene Tierney) knew no better. She was helping with the chores on her father's farm when fate gave her a chance to go to Dragonwyck, the Hudson Valley home of a distant relative. Miranda trembled with joy, begged to be allowed to accept. Her parents, dubious at first, finally relented...
...Romance. Once the U.S. had been the world's greatest whaling nation. In the 1840s as many as 735 ships and 40,000 men went out from narrow New England ports to hunt in the seven seas. The incredibly hard life which inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick also inspired less printable tales. Said one shocked observer: "In Hawaii, intemperance and lust have run riot. Almost every ship anchored is a floating brothel...