Word: 1840s
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...lesson: watch out for the jaded aristocrats of New York. Back in the 1840s, according to the evidence of Dragonwyck, one innocent Greenwich girl named Miranda (Gene Tierney) knew no better. She was helping with the chores on her father's farm when fate gave her a chance to go to Dragonwyck, the Hudson Valley home of a distant relative. Miranda trembled with joy, begged to be allowed to accept. Her parents, dubious at first, finally relented...
...Romance. Once the U.S. had been the world's greatest whaling nation. In the 1840s as many as 735 ships and 40,000 men went out from narrow New England ports to hunt in the seven seas. The incredibly hard life which inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick also inspired less printable tales. Said one shocked observer: "In Hawaii, intemperance and lust have run riot. Almost every ship anchored is a floating brothel...
Favorite drugs were "mercurials, calomel, opium, niter, Glauber's salts, Dover's powders, jalap, Peruvian bark-and by the 1840s, quinine" in heroic doses. One doctor reported a patient who took so much calomel that his teeth fell out, then the upper and lower jawbones came out "in the form of horse shoes." One treatment for the ague involved putting the patient in a draft between two cabins, stripping off his clothes, pouring cold water over him until he had a "pretty powerful smart chance of a shake...
...early 19th Century, shortly after chemists discovered ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas), some medical students went on jags, taking a few whiffs of one drug or the other until half-conscious and happily drunk. In the early 1840s,'dashing young Dr. Long sniffed ether at parties, but was clear-headed enough to notice that his drunken friends, if they came to blows, felt no pain. So one day in 1842, he fearfully soaked a towel in ether, anesthetized a friend before removing a tumor...
Conspicuous among the adolescent pimples of the U. S. were the Utopian socialisms which broke out sporadically in the 19th Century on the maps of New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio. There were Owenite communities in the 1820s, Fourier phalanges in the 1840s, spiritualist communes in the 1850s. As one Utopia failed, the Utopians, dogged, idealistic, excitable, looked round for new capital, moved to the next county, started another Utopia. Most Utopians came from the cities and were bad farmers. Most of them acquired too much land, which was foreclosed at the first slim crop. New Harmony...