Word: 1840s
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...Bowditch rollicking was a Massachusetts astronomer and mathmetician. In 1799 he wr50te the U.S.'s first authoritative mariner's manual. Did he look like a rollicking seafarer or a pinch-faced accountant? How pretty was Charlotte Cushman, the American stage's most beguiling actress of the 1840s?Gold was first discovered in California at Sutler's Mill, but who was this German-born idealist, John A. Sutter? And what was his appearance after the gold rush had, paradoxically enough, ruined...
Rising in the Rockies and meandering listlessly through four states, the silt-strangled Arkansas River has brought devastating floods and fascinating legends to the hapless people along its banks, but not much else. Boatmen in the 1840s stopped near Conway to soak up liquor and lie in the sun until they swelled like toads, giving Toadsuck Ferry its name. At Dwight Mission, the Cherokee sage, Sequoyah, developed his syllabary in 1828, providing a written Indian language. Now Toadsuck Ferry is gone, replaced by a bridge, and Dwight Mission lies under the waters of a reservoir. Both are victims...
...history of U.S. drinking has been marked by two revolutions. The first dates from the 1840s, when the national temperance movement began its crusade to dry up the country. In the process, which led to the Prohibition Amendment of 1919, the U.S. developed a guilt complex about drink that it has not yet fully overcome. But there is increasing evidence of the second revolution in the public attitude toward alcohol: the country is learning to accept its drinking habit as a social custom that is as ineradicable as it is harmless when practiced in moderation. The alcoholic is a product...
...often the artist's escape. Such was the case of Charlotte Bronte, the most prolific of the Brontë sisters, who flowered briefly in England during the 1840s with strange, powerful novels and poetry. Charlotte was shy and ugly, proud and ambitious. Her three novels, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, are all switches on the old Cinderella theme: the rejected girl is not only poor but plain; her Byronic hero must see not only through the rags but also through the flesh itself to her spiritual beauty...
...lured on board a slave ship commanded by a Captain Legree and taken to the U.S. He was sold, assumed his owner's name and was freed after the Civil War. Some of his story seems to check out: Watkins was a common name in Liberia in the 1840s, and slave-ship records actually list two slave-ship captains named Legree. Charlie also recalls a few words of what has been identified as a Liberian dialect...