Word: 1840s
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...beaver pelt, once the currency of a frontier, has had a treacherous history. In the 1840s the fashion for men's beaver toppers collapsed with the rise of the silk hat, a fashion change that ended the great Western fur brigades and the day of the mountain man. In the 1950s beaver has been slipping from favor in women's coats. "Ladies," says Maine trapper Jasper Haynes, "just aren't wearing beaver coats...
...mountain air. Tough, broadnosed bulldozers hungrily tear up the soil; potbellied scrapers scoop and level it; lumbering compact-ers press it down with their massive weight. Directly before the machines looms a 500-ft. hill that stood in the way of the inland-bound gold seekers of the 1840s, forced the Southern Pacific railroad and later a highway to slink humbly around its base. But it does not deter the road builders of 1957. Their rugged and powerful machines are slashing through the hill, cutting a 360-ft.-deep, 2,200-ft.-long scar -the biggest man-made road gash...
...Southern Railway in Virginia), chicken pens with below hen-killing summer temperatures, cesspools for at least five Pennsylvania towns, factories for moonshiners and counterfeiters, prisons (Marvel Cave, Mo.), natural air conditioning for surface buildings. Kentucky's Mammoth even served as a TB sanatorium for a time in the 1840s (one patient died; the others got sicker...
...which made him a popular hero and brought back information so precise and engagingly written that the passage of more than a century has hardly affected its freshness. Fremont was a young officer in the Army Topographical Corps when he headed his first three Far Western expeditions in the 1840s. His reports to the Government were written with the help of his talented wife; the first two were brought out by several book publishers of the day and became enormously popular during the gold rush. They were, in fact, indispensable, because while many a mountain man had scoured the West...
Turgenev's story, laid in the 1840s, portrays the life, or lack of life, on a nourishing Russian landowner's estate. The landowner's wife, Natalia, with her bright, trivial, citified mind and self-indulgent nature, is bored by her husband, and more entertained than aroused by her sophisticated neighbor. When her son acquires an attractive young tutor, she half tumbles, half pushes herself into love. Discovering that her young ward is also drawn to the tutor, Natalia jealously tries to marry her off elsewhere. Though all this gives the heartfree tutor's ego a great...