Word: clerkish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...screening room has wall-to-wall carpeting. Spider plants spill down from pots hung near the windows. A poster urges lucky tourists to ski the slopes at nearby Westford. Belisle's manner is businesslike. At 35 he is already graying and his narrow face has a mournful, clerkish look. But the transactions he records in this brightly furnished office in Worcester, Mass., deal not with commerce but with cruelty. And cruelty of a kind that few people can contemplate with any measure of equanimity-the torture of small children by their parents...
...recording angel of the American proletariat in the early 20th century was all but forgotten when he died in penury in 1940. He was a mild, slender, clerkish-looking and almost incredibly tenacious man named Lewis Hine. Lugging his clumsy 5-by-7 camera into the factories and mines and sweatshops of America, from the immigrant queues of Ellis Island to the cotton mills of North Carolina, Hine did for the laboring poor of his country what Henry Mayhew had done for London workers in the earlier years of Queen Victoria's reign. He identified a class and made...