Word: 1850s
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...Digger" is a slang term first used in the 1850s to describe a miner in the Australian gold fields. It was popular in World War I as a nickname for an Australian soldier, and today is sometimes employed as a generic name for any Australian...
...resolve. They ignited anger and courage. Each sign and every act were daily reminders that the philosophy of Dred Scott-a Black man has no right that a white man must respect--was as alive in the 1960s (and, yes, in the 1970s) as it was in the 1850s...
Karl Marx was never satisfied with the American Revolution. In the 1850s he expected another momentarily. For Marx and many later observers, the colonies' uprising was a "conservative" revolution that failed to make radical shifts in social and economic relations. Perhaps not at the time. But, above all, the American Revolution presented the world with a daring concept: the right of people to choose their own form of government. When Marx's revolution finally occurred in Russia, exactly the opposite principle was established: an elite was given the power to choose the government for the people. That this...
...incarnations, the 1947 play with Basil Rathbone and an oft-replayed movie starring Ralph Richardson as the coruscating father. The torment inflicted upon the daughter by the father can still stir old-fashioned pity, even in the age of women's lib, and the claustrophobic gentility of this 1850s New York home adds a note of melodrama...
...Americans," Walt Whitman wrote in the 1850s, "are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world, and the most perfect users of words." The line was more hopeful than prophetic. Today, many believe that the American language has lost not only its melody but a lot of its meaning. Schoolchildren and even college students often seem disastrously ignorant of words; they stare, uncomprehending, at simple declarative English. Leon Botstein, president of New York's Bard College, says with glum hyperbole: "The English language is dying, because it is not taught. " Others believe that...