Word: 1850s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ureli Corelli Hill, the orchestra gave only three concerts its first year. It charged the astronomical price of $1.11 a ticket (the going price for 20 Ibs. of beef). Unlike the Vienna Philharmonic, though, which was founded the same year and forced to suspend operations several times in the 1850s, the New York Philharmonic stayed solvent...
...there was also much that had not changed. In the 1850s, American composers filled the press with complaints that the Philharmonic was bypassing native creativity in favor of established European classics. The composers are still complaining. And last week Bernstein explained why. The "natural growth and decline" of symphonic literature, he said, "has left us with a great repertory of masterpieces from the 18th and 19th centuries, but only a few from the 20th. The orchestra today is booming as never before, but as a museum. The conductor today is a kind of curator...
...feel about themselves functioning in America. Thus in the 19th century every imaginable interest group claimed superior nativity. Businessmen denounced unionists as alien anarchists; each generation of naturalized immigrants scorned each later wave of "foreigners," notably Roman Catholics, victims of outrageous persecution by the nativist Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just before the Civil War, slavery apologists attributed to themselves the one true Americanism; some Southerners wanted to claim the Stars and Stripes as their own flag...
...prominence lasted little more than a decade, but while it did Frederic Edwin Church caught the imagination of the American public as no other U.S. painter had before. In the 1850s, his eloquent flair for embodying the nation's grand notion of "manifest destiny" made his paintings public events. On one day alone in 1857, Horace Greeley, George Bancroft, George Ripley, Henry Ward Beecher and Charles A. Dana were among the crowds that filed past Church's Niagara. Two years later, the throngs that flocked to his studio to see The Heart of the Andes were so dense...
American colonists used Indian trails at first, eventually widened them and straightened them as part of a network of quagmire-pocked coach roads connecting major cities along the East Coast. Not until the late 1850s, when Congress appropriated $550,000 for three wagon roads, did anyone going West from the Mississippi River have anything but trackless prairies to drive on. From then on, road networks spread like spider webs across the U.S. In 1904 the U.S. Office of Road Inquiry took a national highway census that showed 2,000,000 miles of roads, just 250 miles of them paved...