Word: 18th
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...dauntingly complex thing. It reflects developments generations ago much the way a traffic jam on the autoroute can persist for hours after a crash has been cleared away. France, in fact, has long been something of a demographic exception in Europe. Its birthrate started to drop in the late 18th century, and over the course of the 19th century it was the French who worried as the British and Germans bred like rabbits. Prussia's victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 strengthened the idea that having babies was a patriotic duty, an idea compounded by the national...
...simplified historical terms, on one side are the supremely rational (and unashamedly artificial) boulevards of André Le Nôtre's design for the Gardens of Versailles, with their long Baroque vistas and knife-edge perpendiculars. On the other side are the parks and estates of Lancelot (Capability) Brown, the 18th century English landscape designer whose gently (and shrewdly) idealized version of nature, with its faux-pastoral scenic effects, all those rolling mounds and little groves, was an important inspiration for Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City...
...discuss anything which strikes his fancy at the moment. If he can sneak the first assumption past the grader, then the rest is clear sailing. If he fails, he still gets a fair amount of credit for his irrelevant but fact-filled discussion of scientific progress in the 18th century. And it is amazing what some graders will swallow in the name of intellectual freedom...
...never went to Japan, he befriended writers, curators and art dealers who did, and they steered him toward quality. His treasures, all hand-printed from wood blocks, encompass the best of ukiyo-e - "images of the floating world" of geishas, Kabuki actors and pleasure houses that flourished in 18th and 19th century Edo, as Tokyo was known. These include works by such giants as Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai and Kitagawa Utamaro. Rarer still are the fierce battle scenes from the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 that Monet collected, as well as images of Westerners relaxing in Yokohama, the port...
...Christmas used to be a very raucous outdoor celebration, in the English tradition. So much so that it was really condemned by a lot of religious figures, and banned in some of the states in the 18th and 19th century. What we've done to the holiday is to turn it into something you have to celebrate privately, in your home, in your family. You don't put on costumes as you might once have done, and go from door to door, and then dance in the public square. You stay indoors, among your family. But I'm always fascinated...