Word: 1850s
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Panning out the thin gold in Nevada's Carson Valley in the 1850s, miners cursed a heavy blue sand that clogged their rockers. In 1859, "Old Pancake" Comstock and three others, playing a hunch, staked out a 1,500-ft. claim around the mouth of a small spring where the blue sand was thick. They sent a sample of crumbly stuff across the mountains to an assayer in Grass Valley, Calif. He tested it twice, to be sure. There was no doubt: the stuff that gold miners had cursed and kicked aside was rich in silver...
Waiting for the Senate's weekend recess, newsmen heard a crackling noise from the main corridor of the Senate wing. The old English Minton floor tiles, laid in the 1850s and now irreplaceable, had begun to heave upward. They buckled into a ridge 20 feet long. Capitol architects guessed the cause was a sudden change of temperature. Reporters happily accepted the theory that someone had opened a door from the Senate chamber and let out a blast...
That was just about one century ago, at a time when His Majesty's subjects still well remembered the War of 1812. The Montreal Times folded in the early 1850s. Commented the more contemporary Montreal Gazette last week: "The Times was a good paper. . . . But it may hardly be quoted as typically representative of the opinion in the city at the present...
Back in the 1850s, this ad, appearing in James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, meant not only high adventure for the men who answered it. It also meant that famed William Walker, the first & foremost of U.S. soldiers of fortune in Latin America,* was on the march...
...against the night, there was nothing that so pleased the Victorian as to lay back his head on the antimacassar and curdle his comfortable blood with fiction about fiends in human form. So Victorian Novelist Wilkie Collins, who dispensed such fiction, was not displeased, one moonlit night in the 1850s, when a beautiful lady, robed all in white, ran up to him on a lonely road, screaming for succor. She had escaped, explained the white lady, from a fiend who had held her in durance with the help of hypnotic powers and a kitchen poker...