Word: astor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sept. 22: Luncheon for Camilla Parker Bowles at Brooke Astor's home, N.Y.C...
...form of souvenir collecting. My father used to keep a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with the young Richard Nixon, the two of them beaming at each other; my father posted a little sign at the bottom of the picture: COUNT YOUR FINGERS. Historical continuities: Brooke Astor, now 97, remembers the day when, as a little girl, she shook the hand of Henry Adams. I recall the day when I was a child working for the summer as a Senate page and the aged Herbert Hoover visited the Senate chamber, not a celebrity so much as a curiosity...
...favorite riot, funny until it turned fatal, occurred at New York City's Astor Place Theater in May 1849, when factions supporting two rival Shakespearean actors--William Macready, the mincing traditionalist from England, and Edwin Forrest, the obstreperous, furniture-chewing American--became so violent at Macready's performance of Macbeth that the militia was summoned. The militia opened fire, and 22 boisterous theater lovers died...
...center of the plot is the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company, which plans to reposition the globe so that the Earth's climate will be universally benign, like everlasting spring ("Polar bears will soon have to use artificial ice"). In Astor's view, "this period--A.D. 2000--is by far the most wonderful the world has as yet seen." But the world has grown too small, which is why the book's main characters take off for Jupiter in a spaceship equipped with booster rockets. "The future glory of the human race," concludes Astor, "lies in exploring at least the solar...
Alongside Astor's kind of optimism, the Socialist critique of society and the era's muckraking passions continued, contributing darker shades to images of the future. In 1903 William Wallace Cook, a newspaperman and free-lance writer, published A Round Trip to the Year 2000, in which robots known as "muglugs" displace human workers, sending them to live out a miserable existence somewhere in the Midwest (a vision not designed to cheer chambers of commerce in the heartland). Voracious capitalism has triumphed. The "Air Trust" sells the very air people breathe; the "Sun Trust" forces the public to pay even...