Word: 1900s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...month's welfare check, and you are already trying to support six children, it's an awful lot of money. In fact, the whole situation smacks of injustice. Just imagine what would have happened if, when the Supreme Court upheld the compulsory education acts in the early 1900s; state governments refused to fund public schools four years later. Not everyone believed then, and some people probably don't believe today, that sending your kids to school is the best thing for them. There would have been a lot of parents forced to send their children to school without being able...
SOMETIME EARLY IN THE 1900s, the white politicians of the midwestern town that is the setting for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon got worried. The city's blacks had named the street on which the only black doctor in town lived "Doctor Street," and the name seemed likely to stick. In an effort to fight the renegades, the town fathers put up notices in the black neighborhood: the street was "Mains Avenue," not Doctor Street. The Soutside residents responded in kind, calling the street "Not Doctor Street," just as they called Mercy Hospital "No Mercy" because it refused...
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...