Word: 19th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...19th century the great powers opposed the upsurge of democracy. Czar Nicholas I of Russia, for example, sent an army to Hungary to crush the revolt there. By contrast, this year's revolutionaries have had the tacit blessing, and sometimes the explicit encouragement, of the Czar's successor as the most powerful man in Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev. By what he has done -- and, perhaps more important, by what he has refrained from doing -- the Soviet leader has made possible the astonishing events of this year...
...precisely because of their lowly status, these men had a more than usually powerful need to assert their manhood through deadly exertion. Glory is at its best when it shows their proud embrace of 19th century warfare at its most brutal. Director Edward Zwick graphically demonstrates the absurdity of lines of soldiers slowly advancing across open ground, shoulder to shoulder, in the face of withering rifle volleys and horrendous cannonade. The fact that the 54th finally achieves respect (and opens the way for other black soldiers) only by losing half its number in a foredoomed assault on an impregnable fortress...
Fantasy Furniture by Bruce M. Newman (Rizzoli; $50). A mythological mahogany bird to cradle an infant in 19th century Russia; jolly Black Forest bears to serve as chair-backs; gilded Venetian settees with shell motifs to turn salons into grottoes: thus did the dreams of burghers and kings like Bavaria's mad Ludwig II make chimeras real...
...reunification of Germany is inevitable. That need not represent a military or commercial threat in 19th century balance-of-power terms -- but only if reunification is achieved within a European framework...
...Supermarkets, drive-ins, car washes, neon signs and other exuberant examples of Pop architecture, mostly from the 1950s, are being touted for preservation, and some have already been set aside as historic landmarks by local and state agencies. "Many of the things that were taken for granted in the 19th century -- factories, mills, neighborhoods -- people now want to save," says Chester H. Liebs, historian and author of Main Street to Miracle Mile. "The same thing is going to happen to this century...