Word: 1840s
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...sinister betrayal of the fundamental precept of American democracy." In the influential Jesuit weekly America, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a front-rank Catholic theologian, said that "the oldest American prejudice. anti-Catholicism, is as poisonously alive today as it was in 1928, or even in the 1840s. My chief hope is that old Catholic angers will not rise. Now is the time for the tra dition of reason, which is the Catholic tradition, to assert itself...
Mark Twain once said: "When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not." Last week NBC's Project 20 movingly remembered what happened to Mark, from his Hannibal, Mo. boyhood in the 1840s to the day of his death, exactly 50 years ago. Mark Twain's America followed the technique of Project 20's earlier and equally successful Meet Mr. Lincoln, used some 1,000 old photographs to bring back the patch of U.S. history Samuel Clemens helped needle into place. The pictures of the Old West, which attracted Twain as both reporter...
...that they may contain all sorts of creatures unknown to science. Explorers glimpse them, perhaps bring back a few strips of skin or a blurry photograph, and are greeted with skepticism or accused of attempting a hoax. The pygmy hippopotamus of West Africa has been seen repeatedly since the 1840s. Skulls were brought out for study, and a young one actually lived several weeks in the Dublin zoo. But for 50 years authorities refused to accept it as a real and new genus...
...principle, handball dates from the first time that a boy bounced a ball against a wall. Most authorities credit Irish immigrants of the 1840s with introducing the formal game to the U.S., where it found an early fan in Abraham Lincoln. In the modern, furiously fast sport, the ball can be hit with either hand (hand-ballers consider rackets sissy stuff). The most difficult shot is a "fly kill." in which the player takes the ball in the air off the front wall, hits it against a side wall at a sharp angle so that it has lost nearly...
...theater, known as the fabulous invalid for generations, was in a particularly palsied state in the 1840s. Sniffed a young Brooklyn Eagle critic named Walt Whitman: "Bad taste carries the day with hardly a pleasant point to mitigate its coarseness." New York's Park Theater, for one, was fast approaching the day when patrons sat on bare benches, watching rats fight the actors for stage center...