Word: 1840s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...idea of "common schools" that adopt the same curriculum and standards isn't new. It first arose in the 1840s, largely owing to the influence of the reformer Horace Mann. But the U.S. Constitution leaves public education to the states, and the states devolve much of the authority to local school districts, of which there are now more than 13,000 in the U.S. The Federal Government provides less than 9% of the funding for K-12 schools. That is why it has proved impossible thus far to create common curriculum standards nationwide. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush summoned...
...Bristed, the son of America's first multi-millionaire, penned the diary while he was studying classics at Cambridge in the 1840s. Now, for the first time in more than a century, his work is being republished in An American In Victorian Cambridge: Charles Astor Bristed's "Five Years in An English University." His rich account of Cambridge's devil-may-care student life is part memoir, part instructional guide: it offers tips on navigating the city's twisting streets and preparing for the university's notoriously difficult exams, while also divulging how students weaseled their way out of them...
...cubes into ice boxes made of wood and often lined with tin. According to Dupont, which later invented the coolant Freon, ice was harvested where it formed naturally - including from New York City's rivers - and shipped to the South, all in the name of food storage. In the 1840s, a Florida physician named John Gorrie, trying to cool the rooms where patients were suffering from yellow fever, figured out how to make ice using mechanical refrigeration, paving the way for household refrigerators that appeared in American homes en masse in the 1920s and 1930s. It wasn't a moment...
...most part, in other words, these people were not horrible. But the conditions they faced often were. In Parramatta, by the 1840s, a Francis Greenway-designed factory built to accommodate 300 was holding 1,200 women, who worked from dawn to dusk on tasks that included stone breaking, spinning, needlework and laundry. Unlike their male counterparts, they were spared the lash. But they were not spared solitary confinement or the indignity of being gagged or having their head shaved for serious misconduct. Parramatta hosted Australia's first act of industrial defiance in 1827, when hundreds of convict women rioted over...
Stephen Carter is right to point out that "Was Twain a racist?" is a ridiculous question. He was raised in Missouri in the 1830s and 1840s. Of course he was racist--at least for part of his life. And so is Huckleberry Finn, which is part of what makes the book so brilliant. The reader, through Huck, comes to see how absurd racism is, as Jim is fully humanized on their trip down the river together. Twain's point is that racism is socially conditioned and is contrary to the natural inclinations of the human heart. Huck defies the laws...