Word: 1880s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the 1880s, Bunau-Varilla worked for a private French company that attempted to dig a canal through the muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan...
Most collectors sell and swap in order to complete "sets"-series of cards distributed by one company in a single year. Over 2,000 such sets exist today, including some dating back to the 1880s when Old Judge Tobacco first printed crude photographs of players on cards, which were used as stiffeners in cigarette packages. Since then baseball cards have come with everything from Pepsi-Cola cartons to Burger Chef disposable trays. And, of course, bubble gum. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., which prints 250 million cards a year and pays players $250 plus royalties to pose, makes the largest...
Pont-Aven, the setting for much of this loosely structured, deliberately vulgar French comedy, is the seacoast town where Paul Gauguin settled temporarily after abandoning his job and family in the 1880s. The hero of The Cookies is a present-day painter who also throws over a boring wife and job and moves to Pont-Aven. One major difference between the two men, however, is that Gauguin became in his rebellion a leading light of the French avantgarde. The hero of Cookies, both as a man and a painter, is largely obsessed with female buttocks. He is an artist...
...killing of hundreds if not thousands of Ugandan Christians, who number about 7 million in a country of 11.6 million. His action was painfully reminiscent of the stories of the "Uganda martyrs," a group of about 200 Christian converts who were persecuted and put to death in the 1880s by King Mwanga, ruler of Buganda, the largest of Uganda's four ancient tribal kingdoms. In 1964, 22 of the martyrs were canonized by the Roman Catholic Church...
...France, the guillotine dispatches condemned criminals. In Britain, it is a device designed to cut off endless parliamentary debate-much as cloture is used in the U.S. Congress. Begun in the 1880s to combat the obstructionist tactics of Irish Nationalist Charles Parnell and his colleagues, the guillotine has been a welcome procedure for circumventing parliamentary bottlenecks. But when employed prematurely to close off debate on major, hotly contested legislation, it can stir up the wrath of M.P.s on both sides of the floor. Last week Prime Minister James Callaghan's Labor government ran into just that kind of resistance...