Word: 19th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...course, it is hard enough to be a decent and intelligent private person. In the late 20th century, when the media magnify every private witlessness of public figures, then even the appearances of traditional majesty are at risk. Walter Bagehot wrote of the monarchy in the 19th century: "You must not let daylight in upon magic." You must not let daylight in upon Dracula either. Relentless public exposure is the death of grandeur, especially when there are tapes from the phone conversations. The tabloid is to the House of Windsor as a summer dawn to the Transylvanian count...
...avoid sloshing in the tracks of the white whale. Although I'm an American history and literature concentrator, I have as yet evaded a re-reading of Melville's tome (sacrilege in many Harvard quarters), but I think Ahab's ghost may return to haunt me next year in 19th-century literature...
These are the kinds of questions that are asked--and, for a price, answered--by the forward-looking folks who call themselves futurists. Once the calling of wild-eyed Cassandras and 19th century writers and social scientists on the radical fringe, long-range forecasting has become a sophisticated and quite profitable industry. Its practitioners, who appear with increasing frequency in the press and on the best-seller lists, run the professional gamut: from pop-culture chroniclers like Faith Popcorn ("cocooning") and Douglas Rushkoff (Cyberia) through digital-media stars like M.I.T.'s Nicholas Negroponte and the Institute for the Future...
...engage the community is bound to fail. As Michael Sandel, a political thinker who teaches government here, contends, good government requires what he calls "successful republican (small r, to be sure!) soulcraft" and involves a gentler kind of tutelage. For example, the political economy of citizenship that informed 19th-century American life sought to cultivate not only commonality but also the independence and judgement to deliberate well about the common good. It worked not by coercion or deprivation as most of the present politicians advocate but by a complex mix of persuasion and habituation, what Alexis de Tocqueville, the French...
...National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it's that Homer was not just a fine American painter but one of the great realist artists of the 19th century as a whole, comparable in achievement to Manet or Courbet, if not Degas. The show's curators, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, have brought enormous scholarly energy to arguing this on the walls, winnowing Homer's 2,000 or so surviving works to some 180 paintings, watercolors...