Word: 1840s
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Crackpot and Eccentric. By the 1840s, Porter's urge to paint was waning, and journalism caught his grasshopperish interest. In 1845, while working as an electroplater in New York, he launched the Scientific American, mainly to have a showcase for his ideas. He served as editor, wrote most of the early articles, and liberally sprinkled the magazine with the Rube Goldberg-esque diagrams that he made for his machines. But within a year of its founding, he sold it. He had an idea for a rifle with a revolving chamber and foolishly sold it to Samuel Colt of Hartford...
Scene 1: A Southern plantation in the 1840s. A group of black slaves (then known as darkies) sits around a ramshackle log cabin. One strums a banjo-a cigar box and a stick strung with horsehair-as they sing...
...Marxist vision attracts many members of this mixed bag may be explained by a quick look back at Marx's Europe of the 1840s, which in today's parlance would be called a "developing area." Its social structure was crumbling under the impact of science and industrialization. Three attitudes toward change were fairly clearly defined: 1) conservative, 2) progressive or, as it was called, "liberal," and 3) revolutionary. Then, as now, thoroughgoing reactionaries were hard to find; nobody seriously tried to restore the pre-industrial Europe. But there were many clingers, people who fought rearguard actions, defending...
...this conclusion, she darts around history hunting for examples like a bee in a clover field. Ancient Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley, Tokyo in 1900, medieval Antwerp are all plundered for signs of stagnation or growth. But her key comparison is drawn from 19th century England. In the 1840s, says Jane Jacobs, Manchester looked like a model of progress and modernity. It had become a rich, gigantic industrial machine for cranking out textiles. By contrast, Birmingham then seemed outmoded. It was "a muddle of oddments," where myriad small firms busily made saddles, harnesses, tools, buttons, guns, jewelry, papier...
...play, but never got around to outlining the final drama, so far as is known. Blind Beauty itself was, in fact, believed lost, the only copies having been seized by the secret police. How a copy survived and reached the West is unknown. A sensational melodrama, set in the 1840s, the work bristles with bandits and bursts of gunfire. The heroine is a serf girl, blinded as the result of a violent quarrel between master and slave. She seems to be meant to symbolize Russia, forever the victim of the conflict between barbarism and the simple, instinctive virtue that exists...