Word: 1960s
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dealt directly with nearly every major dilemma Cambridge has confronted in the past 40 years, from racial unrest and student protest in the 1960s to economic woes and crime waves in the '70s, through the desegregation wars of 1980 and 1981 to the economic renaissance of the late...
Frost's personal reputation was knocked off the pedestal some years ago. In the 1960s, Lawrance Thompson, his official biographer and onetime friend, published a three-volume life that was in many ways hostile. Revisionism is one of the cheap thrills of literary biography. Thompson reported that Frost had been, behind his endearing facade, something of a monster. He described, for example, the night Frost's daughter Lesley stumbled downstairs into the kitchen when her parents were fighting. Frost was holding a revolver, according to Thompson, and the poet told Lesley to choose which parent she preferred, since...
Raised in London in the 1960s, Berners-Lee was the quintessential child of the computer age. His parents met while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. They taught him to think unconventionally; he'd play games over the breakfast table with imaginary numbers (what's the square root of minus 4?). He made pretend computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape and fell in love with electronics. Later, at Oxford, he built his own working electronic computer out of spare parts and a TV set. He also studied physics, which he thought...
...modern biotechnology--the U.S. biologist developed a hybrid strain of wheat that was enormously more prolific than its natural cousins. Borlaug's "miracle wheat" allowed Mexico to triple its grain production in a matter of years, and when his hybrid was introduced in south Asia in the mid-1960s, wheat yields there jumped 60%. Miracle strains of rice and other grains followed in short order, triggering a global green revolution that put the lie to Malthus' gloomy calculation. For his role in helping stave off world starvation, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace...
...years continental drift was held up to derision--until scientists in the 1960s found a plausible mechanism in the earth's internal motions under the ocean floor. Suddenly, Wegener's disreputable ideas became reputable. Renamed plate tectonics, they gave geology a single unifying theory, explaining everything from earthquakes and volcanoes to the formation of mountain ranges and ocean basins. Sadly, Wegener, who perished on the Greenland icecap in 1930 at age 50, didn't live...