Word: 19th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story is partially based on true events. In the early 19th century, Sade was indeed imprisoned in Charenton, where he staged performances using other inmates as actors. The play within “Marat/Sade” focuses on just one of these stagings: Charlotte Corday’s murder of Jean-Paul Marat at the height of the French Revolution’s political terror...
Before the adoption of standard zones, towns set their own local times. Life was slow; it didn't really matter if 12:07 in one town was 12:15 in the next hamlet over. But with the advent of railroads and their accompanying train schedules in the 19th century, people suddenly needed to know the exact time so they didn't miss their trains (and conductors needed to make sure that trains operating on the same track didn't crash). In 1883, the U.S. and Canada adopted a standard time system. The following year, delegates from 22 nations...
...aristocrat; between the lofty, cerebral leadership figure and the pragmatic official driven to get things done - and it cuts across France's entire political landscape," says political analyst Stéphane Rozès, president of CAP, a consultancy. "Dominique de Villepin is a man of the 19th century whose weapons are words, while Nicolas Sarkozy is a postmodern man who wants action, not talk ... Each man represents a class of French politicians seeking ascendancy over one another." (See pictures of the French celebrating Bastille...
Silly as it is, this matters. Because words shape our world. Ms. is not some trendy modern social contraption. It was first spotted on the tombstone of Ms. Sarah Spooner in 1767, the handiwork, perhaps, of a frugal stone carver. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Mrs. and Miss were deployed to signal age, not marital status. Both were derived from Mistress, a word that, before it put on its feather boa and fishnet stockings, was the title for any woman with authority over a household...
...face of the Protestant work ethic. Puritans drafted the first gambling regulations in the New World with self-satisfied relish. “If asked to name the greatest agencies of evil in the land,” declared one Methodist preacher from New Orleans in the late 19th century, “we would not have declared the giant evil until we had named the Louisiana State Lottery.” Preachers, the moral compasses of their day, took to the pulpit to rail against an activity in which whole pots of money hung on the whims of fortune...