Word: 1900s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...always thus. During the Vietnam era, many Americans came to regard the U.S. officer class as a band of dissemblers and incompetents. As for the grunts, their ranks had long been considered a repository for society's dropouts. From the Revolutionary War to the early 1900s, it was not only common but legal for a conscript to pay someone else to take his place in the armed forces. Some criminal court judges even sentenced miscreants to military service...
Richardson's account of such figures has to be the most readable description of the avant-garde milieu of 1900s Paris since Roger Shattuck's classic work, The Banquet Years. But they are not there as mere background; their impact on Picasso, their role in the formation of his ideas and imagery, is carefully assessed. One sees, for instance, what Picasso's work got from his "odd couple" friendship with his diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist...
Isolated from outsiders until the early 1900s, some 24,000 Yanomami still dwell in Brazil and Venezuela. They live in doughnut-shaped communal homes, have no written language, wear no clothes, use rudimentary tools and subsist by hunting, fishing and cultivating a variety of crops, including sweet potatoes and bananas...
When "the Troubles" flared anew in 1969, children who were under 16 and too young for the I.R.A. rushed to join the Na Fianna Eirann, a group created in the early 1900s as an Irish patriot's answer to Baden-Powell's John Bullish Boy Scouts. Members did a lot more than sing folk songs and hike; they fought, and the authorities made no distinction between Fianna and I.R.A. suspects. Fianna members had their own uniform, and the black shirts, berets and sunglasses gave even small children a scary paramilitary look. The youngsters became a macabre part of the pageantry...
...bountiful sea life that initially drew large numbers of men to the southern continent. When James Cook first circled Antarctica between 1772 and 1775, he saw hordes of seals on the surrounding islands, and during the next century the continent became a hunter's paradise. By the early 1900s, elephant and fur seals were nearly extinct. And after 1904, more than 1 million blue, minke and fin whales were harpooned in Antarctic waters...