Word: 1840s
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After the wheel was invented, some cave dwellers undoubtedly complained that ruts would ruin the footpaths. Many millenniums later, in the 1840s, farmers of New York's Suffolk County rebelled against another recent invention; they tore up railway tracks, put the torch to depots and caused wrecks by loosening rail ties. The iron horse was evil, they complained; its sparks set fields afire, its bells and noisy clatter shocked cows into withholding milk, and its soot soiled laundry. Decades later, the first autos were denounced for scaring horses and for spewing objectionable fumes...
Sand was deeply committed to non-violent political change, characterizing herself at various points as a "Christian humanist" (she was a lapsed Catholic), a socialist and a communist. She fervently participated in the political upheavals in the 1840s and early '50s, writing "militantly socialist" novels and plays, publishing pamphlets and articles promoting revolution. In a letter, she wrote...
...good things" are on MOMA's walls, in plenty, along with a number of revealing oddities. Who would have thought that George Catlin, that dependable journeyman who labored so hard to record the dying Indian tribes on his journeys across America in the 1840s, would produce landscape studies-a low band of earth, a luminous veil of sky-that look like Rothkos...
Cities were growing rapidly in size: by 1830 the population of New York City was 242,000, of Philadelphia 80,462. Though not yet industrialized, the cities were nonetheless violent. The decades of the 1830s and 1840s were among the most tumultuous in our history. Rioting became commonplace for reasons that were partly economic (depressions that put artisans out of work or immigration that put them in competition with cheaper labor), partly religious (Catholics, Masons and Mormons were attacked and their buildings burned), partly political (the early anti-slavery agitation), and partly sporting (the drunker members of volunteer fire companies...
...news gatherers on public opinion. Critics have been examining this issue for more than a century. Typically it has not been the affirmative character of the media that has attracted most attention, but their critical functions, the standing challenge they present to constituted authority. Visiting the U.S. in the 1840s, Charles Dickens blamed the press for practically every kind of moral degeneration, noting that "with ribald slander for its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an enormous class who must find their reading in a newspaper" or nowhere at all. The style of newspapers, as well...