Word: 1890s
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Twain mostly stayed abroad for the rest of the 1890s, establishing his celebrity in Europe and touring the world, making speeches and gathering material for his final, largely acerbic travel book, Following the Equator. When he returned to the U.S. in 1900, the Gilded Age was fading, but America was throwing its weight around internationally. Now Twain was not only solvent again but much in vogue--"The most conspicuous person on the planet," if he did say so himself. The renewed snap in the old boy's garters resounded around the world, as he took stands on American politics that...
...Twain frequently landed here to unload freight. Many of Grand Tower's sons took to the river's barges, hoping to escape into a relatively middle-class existence, and glimpse life beyond the Midwest. Few, however, returned. Last month Knupp opened the modest Mississippi River Museum in an abandoned 1890s Main Street doctor's office here to try to preserve that colorful past. But the river may well be the very thing that causes Grand Tower's undoing...
That, however, may be starting to change. The big news last season was the unexpected success of Spring Awakening, a hard-edged, hard-rocking musical about the sexual coming-of-age of teenagers in repressed 1890s Germany. It's the sort of show that a few years ago would have been satisfied with a critically acclaimed run at a hip downtown theater--where, in fact, Spring Awakening began life in 2006. But the show, buoyed by good reviews, transferred to Broadway the following spring and awakened to find itself, against all odds, a multiple Tony winner and a box-office...
...historic roots of polygamy in the region too have often made trying polygamy cases difficult and sensitive. Utah, a state founded by the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints - Mormons - rejected polygamy in the 1890s as it bid for statehood and now "wants to live down" the image. Says Gale, "Generally, Mormons believe it is a taboo subject." By making the case focus on child and domestic abuse laws, prosecutors avoided the touchy topic...
...pearl market changed in the early 1890s, however, when Japan's Kokichi Mikimoto first successfully cultured pearls, artificially mimicking the natural process and allowing pearls for the first time to be matched for necklaces. A century later, Chinese farmers have further perfected this technique, yielding more than 1,500 tons of freshwater pearls last year, or 95% of the world's pearl production. "Today, the quality of Chinese cultured pearls matches some of the best natural pearls ever found," says Hong Kong gemologist Henry Cheng...