Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...close to indulging the American antiurban instinct to the point of no return. Political pressure to build new housing for the inner-city poor was intense. Urban renewal, a well-intended and wrongheaded federal mission, in those days meant tearing down quirky, densely interwoven neighborhoods of 19th and early 20th century low-rise buildings and putting up expensive, charmless clots of high-rises. Or, even worse, leaving empty tracts. (The resistance of Charleston, S.C., and Savannah to Great Society efforts to clear their slums accounts for those cities' remarkably intact historic districts today.) In the mid-'60s, 1,600 federally...
When London Merchant Peter Durand patented the tin can in 1810, the world was changed forever. Canning revolutionized life on the farm, in the kitchen, on the battlefield. In the 20th century, life would seem primitive and deprived without cans. In 1986 some 102 billion canned items were manufactured. One category of container, the aluminum easy-open beverage can (69 billion produced last year), has so proliferated that the mere existence of empties has engendered a brand-new folk industry. Can picking, some call...
Gorbachev did, however, fill in a few of Soviet history's most troubling blanks. Not since Nikita Khrushchev's now famous secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had a Soviet leader so emphatically denounced the atrocities of the Stalin era -- particularly the terror-filled 1930s, when millions of citizens were arrested or summarily executed, or starved to death as a result of forced collectivization. Declared Gorbachev: "The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the party and the people for the wholesale repressive measures and acts of lawlessness is enormous and unforgivable. This is a lesson...
...triumphal January moment when the American hostages were at last flown out of Iran -- Ronald Reagan became the sixth President to enter the White House in 20 years. That was an alarming turnover and a sort of enigmatic commentary on the problems of leadership in America in the late 20th century. John Kennedy: assassinated. Lyndon Johnson: driven from office. Richard Nixon: forced to resign. Gerald Ford: an unelected President, rejected at the polls. Jimmy Carter: buried in a landslide. Commentators began to wonder whether Americans had a streak of the regicide in them. Going into Reagan's fifth year, however...
...rickety red-and-white bus, playing in penitentiaries and juvenile-detention centers, holding theatrical workshops and performing their largely improvised plays about prison life. One aim is to force prisoners to admit to themselves that criminal behavior is stupid and ugly. "Our work is no more than 20th century versions of medieval folk tales," says the British-born Bergman, a voluble, witty man who smokes incessantly and is forever running his hand through his tangled, shoulder- length hair...