Word: 1840s
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that they may contain all sorts of creatures unknown to science. Explorers glimpse them, perhaps bring back a few strips of skin or a blurry photograph, and are greeted with skepticism or accused of attempting a hoax. The pygmy hippopotamus of West Africa has been seen repeatedly since the 1840s. Skulls were brought out for study, and a young one actually lived several weeks in the Dublin zoo. But for 50 years authorities refused to accept it as a real and new genus...
...principle, handball dates from the first time that a boy bounced a ball against a wall. Most authorities credit Irish immigrants of the 1840s with introducing the formal game to the U.S., where it found an early fan in Abraham Lincoln. In the modern, furiously fast sport, the ball can be hit with either hand (hand-ballers consider rackets sissy stuff). The most difficult shot is a "fly kill." in which the player takes the ball in the air off the front wall, hits it against a side wall at a sharp angle so that it has lost nearly...
...theater, known as the fabulous invalid for generations, was in a particularly palsied state in the 1840s. Sniffed a young Brooklyn Eagle critic named Walt Whitman: "Bad taste carries the day with hardly a pleasant point to mitigate its coarseness." New York's Park Theater, for one, was fast approaching the day when patrons sat on bare benches, watching rats fight the actors for stage center...
...beaver pelt, once the currency of a frontier, has had a treacherous history. In the 1840s the fashion for men's beaver toppers collapsed with the rise of the silk hat, a fashion change that ended the great Western fur brigades and the day of the mountain man. In the 1950s beaver has been slipping from favor in women's coats. "Ladies," says Maine trapper Jasper Haynes, "just aren't wearing beaver coats...
...mountain air. Tough, broadnosed bulldozers hungrily tear up the soil; potbellied scrapers scoop and level it; lumbering compact-ers press it down with their massive weight. Directly before the machines looms a 500-ft. hill that stood in the way of the inland-bound gold seekers of the 1840s, forced the Southern Pacific railroad and later a highway to slink humbly around its base. But it does not deter the road builders of 1957. Their rugged and powerful machines are slashing through the hill, cutting a 360-ft.-deep, 2,200-ft.-long scar -the biggest man-made road gash...