Word: 1850s
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...reader is plunged into a make belief, not a make-believe world. Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man was an early and largely forgotten guide. More studied than read, the book conjured up a group of impostors, gamblers, land agents and divines on an 1850s Mississippi riverboat. The only one to suffer loss of innocence on the trip was the reader, who had been exposed to a masquerade of identities and motivations. He was left with a befuddling sense of life as it is lived but rarely understood...
...brooding portraits and symbolic tableaux, Mathew Brady, engraving the Civil War on the mind of America. After Daguerre is a rich reminder that though photographers, still hobbled by glacially slow exposures, were dabbling with developing techniques like medieval alchemists, photography in France was about to flower by the early 1850s, as soon as it became possible to make many prints easily from a single negative...
...wildest country and among the wildest people we have ever seen," wrote one of Conquistador Hernan Cortes' commanders about Guatemala in 1524. It was only the first of many unflattering stereotypes of Central America. In the U.S. in the 1850s, the heyday of Manifest Destiny, the region was regarded chiefly as an inviting target for territorial expansion. By the turn of the century, the United Fruit Co. was cheered on as it went buccaneering through the region, buying governmental favors for the sake of more and cheaper bananas. Bananas, in fact, were the raison...
Obolensky calls her book "a portrait in photographs" of the Russian Empire between the mid-1850s and 1914. Her selection is, as it should be, highly personal, with quality and design elements as the governing considerations. Large, thick, and superbly laid out on beautiful paper, the book is a triumph of commercial publishing...
McKay is not the only half-truth in the novel; Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor in the 1850s and the national biologist in a golden age of zoology, plays a small but acidulous part in the book. "I have been accused of character assassination," McMahon says, "but in fact his character is a lot worse than I said. He was famous for exploitation of the young people in the museum, for signing his name to their work. The accusations came so credibly and so often, that even his biographer concluded there is a lot of truth to them...