Word: 1840s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nimrud find is especially interesting because it was made in sands that had been sifted and resifted by some of the world's most accomplished treasure hunters. Nimrud created a scientific sensation in the 1840s, when the British archaeologist A.H. Layard uncovered the lamassu, colossal, winged bull-men that guarded the palace entrances. One hundred years later, the site was extensively re-excavated by Max Mallowan, whose mystery-writing wife Agatha Christie kept an office at the Nimrud Digs House and composed portions of an Hercule Poirot novel, Murder in Mesopotamia, at the site...
...early 1840s, the world's first portrait studios had sprung up in New York City and Philadelphia, churning out likenesses of glassy-eyed sitters who looked as though they had been whacked with a board. But it was in England and France that photography took on the character of an art in the work of men like the Parisian caricaturist Nadar, who brought a warm-blooded gravity to camera portraiture...
...England may have been pleasant, but no modern intruder would feel at home there. Houses with handsome fireplaces remained pretty cold, reading by candlelight was difficult, and there was still no running water. It was only the industrial era that brought such improvements as household gas lamps in the 1840s, electricity in the 1880s and then the great heap of laborsaving appliances at the turn of the century. In 1870 fully 60% of employed American women worked as household servants; 50 years later most of the servants had vanished, to be replaced by electric vacuums and washing machines. "The feminine...
...stories. As in previous collections, such as The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Lovers of Their Time, national and personal histories cast a haunting twilight over a lonely present. This works particularly well in the title story of The News from Ireland, which is set in the 1840s. That, of course, is the period of the great famine that sent more than 1 million Irish to the New World. It is also the time when a family of English Protestants named Pulvertaft arrives in Ireland to take over the house and estate of a dead relative. The sense...
Texas harbors surprises: Germans in the hill country, for example, still speaking in the accents that their forebears brought over in the 1840s. Says Robert Strauss, the Texan who is former chairman of the Democratic National Committee: "Texas is a montage of America. From the financial center of Dallas to the high-tech areas of Austin to the agricultural communities. It represents the sea and the mountains and the valleys, great wealth and pockets of poverty...