Word: 1860s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Those shows, however, look like MTV next to Dr. Quinn. Jane Seymour, queen of the network mini-series, stars as the graduate of an Eastern women's medical college who answers an ad and moves west to practice in Colorado Springs in the 1860s. The residents are surprised and dismayed to discover that their new doctor is a woman (her name, unhelpfully, is Michaela), but she quickly proves her skills. In the meantime, she takes over the care of three youngsters whose mother has died of a rattlesnake bite. "After my real ma went to heaven, Dr. Mike...
Many forecasters seem to succumb to either excessive optimism or overheated pessimism. The overoptimists are heirs to the Golden Age of wishful thinking in the 19th century, when conventional wisdom foresaw ever greater prosperity and ease. Jules Verne invented science fiction in the 1860s with his tales of space flight and submarine voyage, and the American Edward Bellamy, in his widely read 1888 novel Looking Backward, imagined Boston around the year 2000 as a genteel Utopia where everyone enjoys equal pay and crime has all but disappeared...
Over the years, there have been repeated efforts to invest the U.S. government with the cachet of divine authority. "In God We Trust" was first stamped on currency in the 1860s. "Under God" was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthyist 1950s. George Bush campaigned in 1988 to have the flag treated like a sacred object. And perhaps every revolution is doomed to be betrayed, sooner or later, by its progeny. It only adds insult to + injury, though, when the betrayal is dressed up in the guise of "traditional values...
Abortion has been illegal in Ireland since the 1860s. When pressure to moderate the law began rising in the 1970s and early '80s, the Catholic Church and antiabortion activists pushed the government to hold a 1983 referendum incorporating the ban into the constitution. After a bitter campaign, the pro- lifers won the vote by a two-thirds majority. The resulting constitutional amendment obliges the government "to respect . . . defend and vindicate" the right to life of the unborn. No exceptions are allowed except in some cases where the mother's life is in danger...
Serfdom in Russia and slavery in the U.S. were both abolished in the 1860s, but the legacy of serfdom has been even more enduring. No wonder; only about 12% of the inhabitants of the U.S. were enslaved in 1860, but almost two- thirds of the Russian empire's people were serfs at the time of emancipation. In 1918 the Bolsheviks instituted a totalitarianism more complete than that of the Nazis, in the judgment of Soviet sociologist Boris Grushin. "Even under Adolf Hitler, German industry was relatively independent of the system," says Grushin, "but in the Soviet Union, everything was swallowed...