Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though others had been warning of pesticide dangers, it was Carson who struck upon the metaphor that would draw all these dire warnings to a point. "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings...Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change...There was a strange stillness...The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of scores of bird...
...times when even genius has to give way to the old Yankee virtues of know-how and can do. And if in this instance these happened to be embodied in the son of a couple of Polish-Jewish immigrants...well, a lot of that kind of thing happens in America...
...population, so that young people would be assigned on the basis of their scores to particular levels in the school system, which would lead to corresponding socioeconomic destinations in adult life. The beginning of the IQ-testing movement overlapped with the eugenics movement--hugely popular in America and Europe among the "better sort" before Hitler gave it a bad name--which held that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing. The state sterilization that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes notoriously endorsed in a 1927 Supreme Court decision (with the slogan "Three generations...
...order to believe this, though, you have to believe that merit and a score on an IQ test are the same thing. Long before IQ was invented, America prided itself on being a country without a class system, in which the talented and industrious would rise and be rewarded. The advent of intelligence tests did not dramatically affect the degree of social mobility in the U.S.--at least not enough for any change to show up in the social-science data. If IQ tests measure a trait that is genetic, and therefore inherited, or a trait that is culturally transmitted...
When the war ended, Mengele fled to South America. He died there in 1979 and was buried quietly under an assumed name. His remains were disinterred and identified in 1985--a too late bit of proof that even the Ubermensch can come to an ignoble...