Word: 1900s
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...carrying an idol of a long-haired fellow nailed to a cross. In the 1800s, thousands of Western missionary families spread across China offering healthcare and famine relief, eliciting accusations of selective distribution to the faithful: Chinese referred pejoratively to peasant converts as "rice Christians." In the early 1900s, Chinese ultra-nationalists marauded across the countryside, decapitating missionaries in the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion. But it was only after the Communist Party swept to power in 1949 that evangelists were finally expelled and extensive church lands reclaimed for farming. Most religious leaders later spent decades in re-education camps. When China...
...first third of the book describes the gradual downfall of Solomon Dorai, the patriarch of the clan, in the fictional village of Chevathar, famous for its succulently sweet blue mangoes. After he dies in the early 1900s in a fateful clash between castes, his two sons leave home. One, the rebellious and violent Aaron, is a daredevil who eventually ends up joining the revolt against the British. The quiet elder brother Daniel takes another path: banished from the family for not fighting against the lower castes, he rejects politics, including Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent independence movement, and becomes a successful...
...Conrad is coming in at the end of the full flowering of Victorian literature--in the last half-century, Eliot (George, not T.S.), Hardy, Henry James, Zola, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, Twain, Melville, Trollope, Tennyson and countless others have been busy penning new works. And with the arrival of the 1900s, our well-travelled Rudolph will soon be able to read new works by Dreiser, Cather, Wharton and Kipling--and then Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, and eventually Paris's own bard of the boulevards, Marcel Proust...
...policy of "stealing" Aboriginal children, mostly those with some white blood, was devised in the early 1900s when eugenic theories were widely touted. In Australia government administrators thought that by bringing mixed-blood Aborigines into the white world, the color could be "bred out of them" over a few generations. Meanwhile the fully black population, regarded as irredeemably primitive, was expected to simply die out. The practice was not widely discussed until 1997, when an official inquiry found consistent patterns of physical and sexual abuse of the "stolen" children, of exploitation in the labor market and of social dislocation that...
Asbestos--a fibrous mineral--was widely used as insulation during the mid-1900s. When its dust was found to be carcinogenic in the '60s and '70s, the insulation quickly fell in popularity...