Word: 18th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the window of his ninth-floor office, Kushal Pal Singh looks down over New Delhi's Jantar Mantar, an elaborate astronomical observatory built by a far-sighted 18th century Hindu ruler. The stone curves and pillars of the observatory worked in conjunction with its massive sundial to measure time, forecast eclipses and determine the positions of stars and planets. The Jantar Mantar "gave me inspiration," says Singh, chairman of DLF, India's largest real estate company. "If this guy who conceived and made the Jantar Mantar centuries ago could be a forward-looking man, why is it that...
...Spanish moss-draped town of 1,800 in the heart of what tourism officials have dubbed Plantation Country, was well out of strike range when Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the state two years ago. Its downtown is a dense collection of graceful buildings, many dating back to the 18th century, which are still as carefully preserved and nurtured as the town's air of Old South gentility. But beginning this week St. Francisville finds itself at the center of a media storm, playing host to a controversial trial over the deaths of 35 nursing home residents in the wake...
...quibble over these simplistic comparisons. But the commuting or holidaying laity will lap them up, as will anyone with a professional interest in globalization. The anarchists, environmentalists, nativists and trade unionists among the latter will certainly be interested to learn that they, too, have their predecessors - factory workers in 18th century England rioted over imported Indian cotton, while abolitionists raged against the market forces and military superiorities that respectively drove and enabled whites to turn blacks into slaves...
...that I mean that there's something slightly comic in the formalities of 18th century language on screen that encourages us to look down at the characters speaking it. Poor dears! If only they could more frankly speak their desires, if only they were not so hedged by the ruling decorum of their historical moment. They encourage in us a kind of smugness, a sense that if they were only more psychologically more hip and open (as we are), their lives would be more fully human, a little less cartoonish. These films therefore miss much of Austen's satirical edge...
Ours is far from the first society to fear for its sons. Leo Braudy of the University of Southern California, in his 2003 book From Chivalry to Terrorism, noted recurring waves of anxiety. Europeans of the 18th century imagined that free trade and the death of feudalism would spell the end of honor and chivalry. Then, with the dawn of the Industrial Age, writers like John Stuart Mill worried that progress itself--with its speed and stress and short attention spans--would cause a sort of "moral effeminacy" and "inaptitude for every kind of struggle...