Word: american
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This] was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression 'tough guy,' was the man of [the year...
...freedom in the face of depression and totalitarianism was not foretold or inevitable. It required political courage and leadership. We now know what Roosevelt and his generation made of their "rendezvous with destiny." Their legacy is our world of freedom. If the example of Franklin Roosevelt and the American Century has taught us anything, it is that we will either work together as One America to shape events or we will be shaped by them. We cannot isolate ourselves from the world; we cannot lead in fits and starts. Now, to this generation entering the new millennium, as Roosevelt said...
...Whether or not [he] had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines ... [His] poem went off like a bomb in a genteel drawing-room, as he intended...
...brilliant American icon gets overtaken from time to time by his own apparent incoherence, his strangeness. He kept minutely detailed account books, for example--he was an obsessive record keeper who made daily notes on everything from barometric readings to the progress of 29 varieties of vegetables at Monticello--yet he somehow lost track of his debts and died bankrupt. The historian Paul Johnson has catalogued a few of the inconsistencies: Jefferson was an elitist who complained bitterly of elites; a humorless man whose favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy; a soft-spoken intellectual sometimes given to violent...
What does it mean to be a Jeffersonian? You must pick your Jefferson. Every other American statesman, Henry Adams wrote, could be portrayed "with a few broad strokes of the brush," but Jefferson "only touch by touch with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of semitransparent shadows...