Word: 1840s
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Leprosy was imported into Hawaii by Chinese laborers in the 1840s. The bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, found a fertile field in the Polynesian population, which, with no prior exposure to the disease, had no natural defenses. Soon hundreds of new cases were being reported annually. The panic that had swept Europe during its epidemics centuries earlier was repeated in Hawaii. In 1865, King Kamehameha V ordered all lepers confined to the most desolate part of his realm, the volcanic, 14-sq.-mi. peninsula of Kalaupapa jutting northward from the coast of Molokai. The first 35 patients were landed in January...
...also impresses with appearances in his recent book, The Fall of Public Man, writing with authority about urban population growth in the 1750s at one moment and about the revolutions of 1848 in the next. Dressing his argument in the social histories of 18th century London, Paris in the 1840s and 1890s, and New York in the 1960s, Sennett attempts to demonstrate a continuous transition from a public-oriented urban culture to one where nothing has any interest or meaning except as a reflection of private life. The codes and conventions that governed behavior in 18th century London encouraged productive...
Only for one brief moment, in the 1840s, does Sennett view the public and private as inseparable: in his novels, Balzac wrote physical descriptions of his characters' appearances that revealed both their psychological make-up and social class. "The web of details" in Balzac's Paris, Sennett writes, "is constructed such that general forces have a meaning only as they can be reflected in individual cases." But instead of showing the gradual dominance of personality in the public realm, Sennett shifts the scene abruptly--to the concert hall where Paganini made his violin performances more riveting than the music itself...
...arrangement began informally in 1955, when Fred Whipple, Phillips Professor of Astronomy, was appointed director of SAO--then based in Washington, D.C. Rather than move from his Cambridge home, Whipple asked that SAO be moved up to the hill off Garden Street where HCO had been operating since the 1840s. Then Cambridge air was clean enough, and astronomy was young enough, for astronomers to make significant observations without leaving the city limits. SAO had a staff of only five people in 1955, so Whipple got the observatory moved without much trouble. The informal link between the two observatories was formalized...
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...