Word: 18th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...baroque splendor of his 18th century offices, Kurt Waldheim entertains few visitors. The Austrian President spends his days huddling with aides -- dubbed the "bunker boys" by sharp-tongued colleagues -- or performing ceremonial functions. He lingers at receptions, hoping that people will talk to him and, more important, be seen talking to him. Asked whether Waldheim would be welcome at the royal court in Stockholm, Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Andersson diplomatically replied, "The problem does not arise. His Majesty's program is booked solid for years, and your question is therefore purely academic...
Outside class, students led a grim existence. Gorbachev spent the first three of his student years in the shabby Stromynka student hostel, an 18th century former barracks that housed 10,000 young people packed eight or more to a room. There was a kitchen and a washroom on each floor, but no proper bathing facilities. Gorbachev and his roommates would head to a public bathhouse twice a month. They stored their personal belongings in suitcases under the beds. Many of the youths could not even afford tea. Instead, they drank "student tea," a concoction of hot water and sugar...
...writing a second book, Confronting the New Age, about the movement's inroads into business and education, it is probably wise to remember that phenomena like the New Age have to some extent been a part of the American scene ever since there was an American scene. Remember the 18th century Shaker leader, Mother Ann Lee, whose followers believed she represented the second coming of Christ. Remember Mary Baker Eddy, severely injured by a fall on the ice, who became cured while reading a passage in St. Matthew and thereafter taught the unreality of all physical ills. Spiritualism...
...commissioned by the nobility and the great merchants, executed by their makers and read by the audience. It wanders off into didactic byways and outlines, among other things, the changing reactions to Gothic art and the problem of its conservation for later generations of antiquaries and romantics in the 18th and 19th centuries. There is an anxious longing to put everything connected with the Middle Ages on view, no matter how slight its aesthetic import. One half-expects to find Piers Plowman's left clog in the next vitrine. It is a gigantic, semidigestible omnium-gatherum, and the visitor needs...
...Americans manage to forget for so many years that downtowns are invigorating and old cities grand? That the dignity and Gemutlichkeit of 18th century buildings and 19th century streets are incomparable? That the physical past is worth preserving? Did a majority of Americans in 1970 actually prefer Century City to San Francisco? Were people fetched by the shiny new discord of Houston suburbs more than by shabby, genteel New Orleans, by the glass and steel of downtown Minneapolis more than by the brick and stone of downtown St. Paul...