Word: 1870s
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...youngster growing up in the 1870s, Appleton was probably a pretty interesting place. "Wisconsin had so many circuses back then," observes Oscar Boldt, president of the Boldt Holding Corp., "and when they unloaded the elephants, there was excitement, real excitement, the sort of excitement you could feed off for months." Today some kids in Appleton still feed off the excitement evoked by the name Houdini. Thirteen-year-old Bill Brehm, an aspiring magician, is one of them. "I'd like to know how he did some of his tricks," confides Brehm, who has started practicing Houdini-inspired handcuff escapes. "Like...
...anarchists killed French President Sadi Carnot. During that era bombs exploded regularly in Parisian theaters, cafes, police stations and courts. After two obscure terrorists bombed the Chamber of Deputies, the president of that body waited for the smoke to clear, then said, "Gentlemen, the meeting continues." In the 1870s the Communards executed 60 hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, during a two-month insurrection that took at least 20,000 lives. A century later the famed Middle East terrorist Carlos, also known as Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, used Paris as a base and once killed two French secret-service...
...adopted the simple black cassock of the Anglican clergy, but kept to the monastic regime and took the traditional monastic vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. "We were just something new," says Father James Madden, explaining the appeal of the new order. The order came to Boston in the 1870s, and moved to Cambridge in the 1930s from downtown...
...several incarnations in many languages, but Art Historian Jean-Paul Bouillon presents the movement under its best-known name in Art Nouveau (Rizzoli; 247 pages; $60). Some 350 illustrations, 125 of them in color, trace its genealogy from the 1870s to the outbreak of World War I, a journey that manages to bridge 19th century formalism and Bauhaus severity. Although Tiffany's lamps and Gaudi's facades are archetypal examples of art nouveau, the author widens artistic horizons, and readers' eyes, by demonstrating that fine artists from Whistler to Picasso were influenced by its rhythmic, serpentine style...
...their shopping at inefficient, local general stores, where they paid high prices and had limited choices. But a growing rail and post office network, with Chicago as the hub, was beginning to turn farmers into a cohesive market. Montgomery Ward had published a catalog for them since the 1870s, but Richard Sears perfected the technique beyond anyone's imagination. Using the expanding rail system that he knew so well and capitalizing on the rapid growth of post-Civil War America, Sears turned his catalog into a powerful link between makers of goods and customers...