Word: 1870s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Soon after the first long-distance pipelines were laid in the Northeast in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the first oil tankers were allowed to pass through the Suez Canal, and the modern shipping system was born. Today crude oil travels in tankers that can carry up to 4 million bbl. With daily world demand at about 85 million bbl., petroleum represents about a third of all international cargo. And even though the commodity is also measured in kiloliters (in Japan) and metric tons (in Russia), thanks to whiskey, the units are always converted to the 42-gal. barrel...
...there are other, less familiar historical moments that also have unmistakable resonance with the present. We've just finished living through a long Gilded Age, in which rich Americans got richer, and more and more people began consuming conspicuously. The original Gilded Age began a century earlier, in the 1870s, during a laissez-faire boom that lasted - déjà vu! - from the end of one Wall Street and banking meltdown (the Panic of 1873) to the beginning of another (the Panic...
...Camels in the Outback? Yes indeed. There are estimated to be over a million of these ungulates roaming at will through the desert, descendants of the original camel caravans led by Afghan drivers in the 1860s and 1870s. It was these migrant cameleers who helped opened up the continent's arid interior to travelers. The country's most famous train, the Ghan, www.gsr.com.au, is named in their honor. (See pictures of Australia's hidden islands...
...arrive by ekspress in Belaga on a sweltering Monday afternoon. The fellow passengers offer a fair representative slice of the Rajang's recent social history: an itinerant Malay dentist who'll pull that blackened molar for $3; Hokkien merchants whose families came from Singapore in the 1870s as traders, glued to the John Woo DVD playing onboard; and longhouse dwellers. Some of the latter are older, with distended earlobes and inked skin, but most are young couples returning from market hubs like Kapit, where Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, built a fort (still standing...
...cigarette companies to national prominence. The first, a cigarette-making machine introduced in the 1880s, dramatically increased production; instead of producing some 40,000 hand-rolled cigarettes a day, a company with one of these machines could produce 4 million cigarettes daily. The second development came in the late 1870s with the invention of color lithography, which revolutionized advertising and packaging and helped developing brands strengthen their identities. Using this new technology, companies began including small cigarette cards in every box as premiums. These collectible trading cards depicted movie stars, famous athletes and even Native American chiefs. While they were...