Word: 1880s
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...Synagogue could not have found a man more fitted for the commission, for though Rattner is not an orthodox believer, his Jewish heritage and faith are often the fire behind his art. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the son of a moneyless baker who had fled from Russia in the 1880s, young Rattner gathered bits of coal along the railroad tracks to heat his parents' home, took whatever odd jobs came along. But what he remembers most vividly about the Poughkeepsie of his youth was the penalty of being Jewish. Only after a kindhearted Irish cop got him boxing lessons...
...Boom. Foreshadowed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508, contact lenses were first made in Europe in the 1880s. They were big, covering most of the sclera (the white of the eye), heavy (made of glass), hard to fit and forbiddingly expensive. Early plastic lenses were also of the big scleral type, had to float on a bath of special wetting fluid, and could be worn only four to five hours at a stretch. Then came the methyl-methacrylate plastics (of the Plexiglas family), the discovery that fluid was unnecessary if lenses had a hole to permit tears to pass beneath...
...Wait to Die? Dana gets as much fun out of giving as he did out of getting. He was to both manners born, in New York City's fashionable Gramercy Park area of the 1880s. His wealthy banker father financed Pacific whaling fleets, invested in coal mines; his cousin was the New York Sun's famed editor-owner. Young Dana was three years out of Columbia law when he became an assistant prosecutor (under William Travers Jerome) in the sensational 1907 trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of Architect Stanford White. It led him into the state...
...since it took root in the mid-1800, the "common school" has been under whiplash criticism. When educators urged a broader curriculum than "the Bible and figgers," opponents cried that "every county in the state will need an insane hospital." When education began to reach sizable proportions in the 1880s. alarmists predicted the downfall of parental authority by "a crime-and-pauper-breeding system." In just one of his dozens of leaflets, Maryland's polemical Pamphleteer Francis B. Livesey blamed public schools for "the Negro problem, the servant problem, the labor problem, the tramp problem, the unemployment problem...
...that Shakespeare had not been presented there professionally for 40 years and not even by amateurs for 20 years. He promptly put the Bard and his students in the same corral. Instead of "a wood near Athens," Reeve's Dream is set on a Texas ranch in the 1880s, and the guitar-twanging players appear in Stetsons, bandannas and bustles (Hippolyta is an Indian princess in white buckskin). The dialogue is unchanged except by Texas tongues: "O naht! alack, alack, alack! Ah feah mah Thisby's promise is furgot...