Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...family moved to Urumqi in Xinjiang. On Wuer's bedroom wall hung a portrait of the ancient poet Qu Yuan. Wuer began to write poetry, and took part in school affairs. He helped edit the school newspaper, an experience friends believe developed his interest in freedom of the press. In the summers he went on school field trips into the mountains to stay with the cossack herdsmen. That too left an impression. "He could tell the difference between the life of the ordinary people and the life of the leaders, and he got ideas from these people," said a friend...
...every schoolchild used to know, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But in the electronic age, the ancient Babylonian constant -- or rather the accurate calculation of its value -- has become a symbol of computational prowess. In the 1950s the U.S. led the way, churning out estimates of pi accurate to thousands and tens of thousands of decimal places. Then the French took the lead. With the emergence of Japan's supercomputer industry in the 1980s, pi has become an almost exclusive province of the Japanese. The last world record, 201 million digits...
...sticks is determined by the tastes or even the sanity of its rulers. Anti- colonialism, however, is the most common rationale for national renaming. During the 1950s and '60s, anti-colonialism swept through the newly independent nations of Africa. The Gold Coast dubbed itself Ghana, in honor of an ancient African empire that was located hundreds of miles from the modern nation. When the Belgian Congo became independent in 1960, it renamed itself the Republic of the Congo. Eleven years later, President Joseph Mobutu rechristened it the Republic of Zaire. A year later, he took his policy of "authenticity" personally...
...called the Trail of Tears to the Oklahoma territory. There, Humphrey's tale has it, the survivors were forced once more to migrate. The weight of such history would seem almost too oppressive for fiction to handle. But Humphrey skillfully balances the misery with the detachment of ancient family legend. The tale descends from a boy named Amos Ferguson, blue-eyed, a doctor's son, and a Cherokee. He survives the migration but, to save himself, lives out his life as a white Texan, the foster son of his father's murderer. Humphrey frames his story with intelligence and compassion...
...trucks with foot soldiers barreled along the crowded streets that empty into the square. Advance troops torched buses and trucks that had been set up as barricades, enabling the convoy to pass through. Suddenly soldiers of the People's Liberation Army seemed to be everywhere: pouring out of the ancient Forbidden City, poised on the rooftops of the Great Hall of the People and Mao ) Zedong's mausoleum, entering the vast, 100-acre square from side streets in a triple-fanged movement from the south, west and east. Ten thousand strong, the army mounted a deliberately vicious assault...