Word: 1870s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rarity on TV medical shows: a crooked doctor. No new adventure hero, it seems, will be admitted to the schedule without an ethnic identity badge. ABC's "Kung Fu" is a sort of "Fugitive" foo yung ? a Chinese priest permanently on the lam in the American West of the 1870s, nonviolent but ready to zap troublemakers with the self-defense art of kung fu. The title character of NBC's "Banacek" (one of three rotating shows in the NBC "Wednesday Mystery Movie") is not only a rugged insurance sleuth but also a walking lightning rod for Polish jokes...
...suspense never really sprouts into page-turning anticipation. John Henry Days evolves in a circular, not a forward, momentum. The contemporary, confected media hype is contrasted, implicitly, throughout the book with the older, mysterious, grassroots spread of the tale of John Henry, who may have died in the early 1870s but who is as impossible to identify historically as Odysseus or Robin Hood. As one character notes, "The Ballad of John Henry has picked up freight from every work camp, wharf and saloon in this land; its route is wherever men work and live, and now its cars brim with...
Cynara's voice and character are, in fits and starts, inspired and inspiring. Newly emancipated and literate, she acquires, by virtue of what she calls her "crazy quilt" education, an arresting fictional presence. She can be blunt, circa the 1870s--"There is a lot of Indian in her nigger"--and sometimes poetic: "Mothers grow flaccid, rich in babylove, each baby taking some of the mother's beauty as if the baby knows it needs to protect its babyself by making Mama less kiss-daddy pretty." Why shouldn't the loyal slaves enshrined in the magnolia myth of GWTW, novel...
...catch up with Western powers was a strategy of defensive mimicry. This was in a sense a Japanese tradition. At various stages in its history, Japan took on the colors of the powers it respected or feared most. So it was in the early Meiji period, especially the 1870s and 1880s...
...ruined and money that was lost as a result of the birth of the huge industries that developed around oil, telephones, movies, automobiles, airplanes, semiconductors and personal computers. Working with young companies can be dangerous for anyone. It doesn't matter whether that was in Akron, Ohio, in the 1870s, Detroit in the 1920s or Santa Clara, Calif., in the 1990s...