Word: blight
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Modern specialists in plant diseases would recognize these ominous signs as symptoms of Phytophthora infestans, a species of fungus with rapid germinating properties and extremely virulent effects. To the half-savage, wholly uneducated peasantry, it was known simply as "the Blight," and regarded as a hellish, heaven-sent scourge. Holy-water and incantation were the only remedies invoked against it. Its onset marked the beginning of perhaps the most bitter famine in post-medieval European history...
Brian Kilmartin, bald, bony, hawk-featured tenant farmer on the hills above the village of Crom; his sons Michael and Martin, and Martin's newlywed wife Mary, are the principal characters. The story starts the year before the famine when the blight touched a tithe of the crop with the first dapplings of disaster. The damage was small that year, but it was enough to make the Kilmartins draw in their belts a little. Potatoes (dug fresh from the ground in summer, stored in fern-lined earthen pits through the winter; served boiled, with a bowlful of salt water...
...Joan Bennett) imminent wedding, when the bride-to-be floors him by imploring him to scotch the wedding by sabotaging the dress. Aristocratic but penniless Wendy, it appears, is well aware she is being sold down the river, regards her rich fiancé, Mr. Morgan (Alan Mowbray) as a blight. Curson, a married man himself, very properly pays no attention to Wendy's pleas, delivers the dress on time. Thereupon Wendy leaves the bridegroom waiting at the church, goes to work for Curson as a model...
...spend himself in an effort to bring into focus a half-year's work. His summary must be a happy synthesis of facts and significant trends. If he shirks, if he warms over a few cold lecture notes, he will lose his own audience and do much to blight a slowly-blossoming system...
...honestly dispassionate analysis of Mr. Roosevelt's administration. Before the election any writing which so much as sniffed at political questions was rudely branded either wholly Democratic or purely Republican. Any work of scholarship which dared to peek around a political corner was immediately seized, and the blight of partisanship was forever stamped upon its cover. Republican voters road Republican pamphlets, and convinced Democrats smiled disdainfully at Herbert Hoover's while fetching a dollar for Secretary Wallace's "latest". Into this potpourri of citizens, now that the party quarantine has been lifted, the Editors of the London "Economist" have dropped...