Word: 1900s
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Conceived by white men in the mid-1800s, minstrel shows evolved a format as rigid as a TV sitcom: performers, usually white, put on blackface makeup and offered up cakewalks, "coon songs" and darky-dialect jokes. Blackface survived until Al Jolson's mammy routines in the early 1900s, as proof that nobody found them offensive -nobody except black entertainers whose talents were suffocated by parody and caricature. Minstrel Man (CBS, Wednesday, March 2, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) provides a rare view of minstrelsy through the eyes of those victims...
Payne said the occasion originated in the early 1900s when women factory workers held a series of strikes to demand better rights for themselves and their families...
...Astronomer Edmund Halley of comet fame showed that Sirius, Procyon and Arcturus had changed positions−relative to other stars−since Greek times, establishing for the first time that the stars were not fixed in the heavens. By the early 1900s, astronomers had learned that the sun was merely one of billions of stars in a disc-shaped galaxy, or island of stars, then believed by many to constitute the entire universe. In 1920 Harlow Shapley calculated that the galaxy, called the Milky Way, was some 300,000 light years* in diameter, a distance too stupendous for most people...
...audiences; in Los Angeles. A tiny (5 ft. 5 in.), restless dynamo who arrived in the U.S. from Hungary at age 16 in 1889 with $40 to his name, Zukor had a simple formula for success: "Look ahead a little and gamble a lot." In the early 1900s, he and another immigrant furrier, Marcus Loew, gambled on the fledgling moving picture business-first with a string of penny arcades featuring flickering, hand-cranked "peep-shows," later with storefront nickelodeons. Convinced that the movies' future lay in full-length dramas, Zukor in 1912 split with Loew, who later became...
Died. Arthur Ernest Morgan, 97, educational innovator, author and chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1933 until 1938, when F.D.R. dismissed him following a policy dispute; in Xenia, Ohio. A surveyor's son, Morgan studied civil engineering in the early 1900s and became one of the nation's top specialists in flood control. In 1913, after a flood hit Dayton, Morgan went there to build the first major diversion reservoir in the U.S. During the next few years, he noticed that many of the college-trained engineers working for him lacked practical skill; to remedy the situation...