Word: britishly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...domestic issues, individual rights and the liberties of colonial subjects, Churchill turned out to be a romantic refugee from a previous era who ended up on the wrong side of history. He did not become Prime Minister, he incorrectly proclaimed in 1942, "to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," which then controlled a quarter of the globe's land. He bulldoggedly opposed the women's-rights movement, other civil-rights crusades and decolonization, and he called Mohandas Gandhi "nauseating" and a "half-naked fakir...
...though he held a first-class ticket. He refused, and ended up spending the night on a desolate platform. It culminated in 1930, when he was 61, and he and his followers marched 240 miles in 24 days to make their own salt from the sea in defiance of British colonial laws and taxes. By the time he reached the sea, several thousand had joined his march, and all along India's coast thousands more were doing the same. More than 60,000 were eventually arrested, including Gandhi, but it was clear who would end up the victors...
...laws" by entering white townships, Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus just as Gandhi had on the South African train, the unknown rebel blocking the line of tanks rumbling toward Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa leading his fellow Polish workers out on strike, the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst launching hunger strikes, American students protesting the Vietnam War by burning their draft cards, and gays and lesbians at Greenwich Village's Stonewall Inn resisting a police raid. In the end, they changed the century as much as the men who commanded armies...
Much to his surprise, his ideas, like Darwin's, reverberated beyond science, influencing modern culture from painting to poetry. At first even many scientists didn't really grasp relativity, prompting Arthur Eddington's celebrated wisecrack (asked if it was true that only three people understood relativity, the witty British astrophysicist paused, then said, "I am trying to think who the third person is"). To the world at large, relativity seemed to pull the rug out from under perceived reality. And for many advanced thinkers of the 1920s, from Dadaists to Cubists to Freudians, that was a fitting credo, reflecting what...
...theory of curved space-time was called general relativity to distinguish it from the original theory without gravity, which was now known as special relativity. It was confirmed in spectacular fashion in 1919, when a British expedition to West Africa observed a slight shift in the position of stars near the sun during an eclipse. Their light, as Einstein had predicted, was bent as it passed the sun. Here was direct evidence that space and time are warped, the greatest change in our perception of the arena in which we live since Euclid wrote his Elements about...