Word: 1970s
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There was some speculation many years ago, in the 1970s, that because women had greater fat stores, they would outlast men in long-distance events. We have a famous race in South Africa, the 90-km (56-mi) Comrades marathon. Some years ago we wrote a paper in which we made the case that if a man and a woman could run a [standard 42-km (26-mi)] marathon in the same time, the woman would likely win the longer Comrades race by about an hour. She'd be about an hour faster...
...economic development was the handmaiden to peace. More recently, charitable organizations (which have been playing a role in development for centuries) responded to humanitarian emergencies in the poor world that aroused public sentiment in the rich one, like the famines in Biafra in the 1960s, and Bangladesh in the 1970s. When Bob Geldof and his friends formed Band Aid/Live Aid in response to the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, in which a million people died, "Feed the world" became the chorus of not just a pop record but the donor world...
...since Ina May Gaskin's natural-childbirth advocacy inspired a generation of home birthers in the 1970s has the practice been such a hot topic--or so hotly contested. While home birthing still accounts for less than 1% of U.S. births, there's a movement afoot to license more lay midwives to attend home births. Concerned by this development, the American Medical Association (AMA) is urging lawmakers to curb the home-birthing movement, including having the licensing of so-called direct-entry midwives--who do not have nursing degrees--overseen by a state medical-practitioner board...
During South Africa's long night of apartheid, white playwright and social commentator Pieter-Dirk Uys felt unable to speak out. So he invented a character who could: Evita Bezuidenhout, the wife of a fictional Afrikaner nationalist figure. In the late 1970s and early '80s, "Evita" lampooned the establishment in a series of satirical diaries. Later, with the help of a wig, heels and a handbag, she became real. Black and white alike loved the subversion. Then, in 1996, Uys took over a derelict railway station in Darling, a semidesert town an hour's drive north of Cape Town...
...certain to raise suspicion in Rome that French officials are reverting to old habits in dealing with Italian fugitives, a source of tension for two decades. There's little disagreement over Petrella's acts as a member of the extreme-left Red Brigades, which battled Italian governments in the 1970s and 1980s in a campaign of assassination, kidnapping, and terror. In 1992 a Rome court convicted Petrella in absentia for her role in the 1981 murder of a police inspector and the kidnapping of a judge. The following year, Petrella fled to France and an open-ended deal proposed...