Word: context
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are many courses at Harvard that parachute you into an arcane debate, with little explanation of the historical context, the basic forces at work, or the import of the outcome...
When we see smoking in this context--as a rite of passage for so many, as an indelible part of our culture, and as an act still in many ways symbolic--it makes no sense to expect to eliminate it by legislating it out of existence. While outlawing cigarettes in our workplaces and restaurants may make the air in some areas cleaner, and play to specious claims about the dangers of second-hand smoke, it also makes tobacco more mysterious, more difficult to obtain, and makes smoking even more of a symbolic act. Suddenly those secret puffs become not just...
...course, we should e wary of taking the actor's lines out of context. so we let the character speak for himself: "If we vote this increase, we're doing what the students want." Clearly, this Beys figure mocks the very concept of the" man of the people," while employing impeccably faculty logic to reach ill-conceived conclusions...
...Marable, director of African-American studies at Columbia University, attributes it to a handful of crackpots engaged in what he calls "vulgar Afrocentrism based purely on speculation and racial divisiveness." It developed as "an attempt to speak to a crying need for identity, purpose and human development within the context of the black underclass." Much of Afrocentrism, he says, is based on solid scholarship...
Brown begins by carefully defining the Jewish role in the death of Jesus. "In a context of hostile inter-Jewish feelings," he says, "how can one dismiss as unthinkable a desire on the part of some fellow Jews for severe action against Jesus, a troubling religious figure?" He stresses that many ordinary Jews sympathized with Jesus, and that only the leaders were responsible for the death sentence. "I'm not talking about guilt," he says, merely "responsibility." Explains Brown: "Those who contribute to the execution of an accused are responsible for that death. They are guilty only if they know...