Word: 1850s
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They needed whatever friends they had. The gnomic initials P.R.B., appended without explanation to their signatures in the 1850s, had the combined effect on many critics of a red flag and a leper's bell. "Monstrously perverse," was a typical comment. "Plainly revolting," was another. Charles Dickens, no less, saw "a hideous, wrynecked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears to have received a poke ... and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster...
Birth control was so rudimentary that pregnancies came annually. They were both painful (until chloroform appeared in 1847) and dangerous (childbed fever was not solved until the 1850s), but Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber in 1839 and soon thereafter got his first patents on birth control devices. More than a century before the famous Pill, the sexual revolution inspired by contraception was under way. The cultural leaders preached against birth control, even prosecuted its advocates, but that only spread the news. Contraceptive devices sounded "perfectly revolting," as one California matron wrote to a friend, but "one must face anything rather than...
...penance, as distinct from the Japanese practice of eating it every day for pleasure. Even Kobe beef, on which every Japanese dotes when he can afford to, is a Western import. The first cow butchered in Japan died for the table of an American consul in Shimoda in the 1850s, and a monument has since been raised to it by the butchers' association of Japan. Before that, cattle were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of were not eaten. The idea of eating beef was as strange as that of eating roast tractor...
Near the corner of Main and Walnut streets in the small town of Maynard, Mass., stands a massive complex of aged red-brick buildings. Within those walls, workers toiled amid clanging, churning machinery to produce carpets in the 1850s and Army blankets during two World Wars. But today the sturdy, old facade houses an entirely different enterprise. The noisy machines and grease-stained factory floor have given way to offices where engineers huddle over glowing oscilloscopes and secretaries peck quietly at word processors. The woolen mill has been reborn as the headquarters of the Digital Equipment Corp., the second largest...
...library is actually owned by 1,049 proprietors, or shareholders. Many of them have inherited then-holdings as valued heirlooms since the last share was sold by the library in the late 1850s. (Daniel Webster, the eloquent Senator from Massachusetts, was shareholder 296; his plaster bust stares out over a young librarian using a computer.) Most shareholders contribute at least $50 a year to the upkeep of the institution, as do "life members" of the library, who achieve their status by applying with references and paying $500. Both proprietors and life members are allotted four tickets a year for "guests...