Word: 1860s
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After the waterway was carved out of wetlands in the 1860s, oil refineries, tanneries and chemical plants moved in and spewed noxious waste into the canal, where it mixed with raw sewage. Before long, Gowanus was a cesspool. Today the surface can appear brown, green, black and sometimes purple, earning the canal the moniker Lavender Lake. Neighborhood residents whisper that the bottom is littered with bodies dumped there by the Mafia. (See pictures of New York City...
...after not just European rule but also 22 years of Haitian occupation. Strife between (as well as within) the neighbors, rooted in deep class, racial and cultural differences, was constant. Interference by foreign powers was often the norm. The Spanish took back the Dominican Republic in the early 1860s, and for periods during the 20th century, the U.S. occupied both nations, supposedly to restore order but also, in the face of European threats, to assert its influence in the western hemisphere. Internal politics were characterized by multiple coups, revolts and dictators, the most infamous being Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican...
...judgment, please do your homework. Ask the Chinese in Nanjing and the Jews of Poland and Russia what they thought of the 1930s, the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the 1940s, the U.S. soldiers in the Hanoi Hilton of the 1960s - not to mention all Americans of the 1860s - and the list goes on. Philip Katz Rockville Centre...
Demonstrations such as these against the nation's military adventures have cropped up at nearly every important conflict in U.S. history. The Peace Democrats of the 1860s became pejoratively known as Copperheads - after a Southeastern snake that attacks without warning - for their opposition to the Civil War. Peace Democrats were mainly recent settlers of the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana and Illinois) with Southern roots and an interest in maintaining the Union, and they made common cause with Northern groups who opposed emancipation and the draft. The antidraft riots of 1863 - dramatized in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York...
...miniseries starts in the mid - 19th century, when nature lovers began urging that the expanding nation set aside areas of wilderness to remain undeveloped and unspoiled. Their cautionary tale was Niagara Falls, which by the 1860s was "almost ruined" - overrun by hucksters and tourist traps, with nearly every good view privately owned. Unless the government acted, advocates like naturalist John Muir warned, Yosemite and Yellowstone would end up the same way. "To Europeans," reads narrator Peter Coyote, Niagara "was proof that the United States was still a backward, uncivilized nation...