Word: convicted
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Thus began a strange new life for Solzhenitsyn. With his wife and three sons he settled on a 50-acre compound in rural Vermont, where he preserved every aspect of Russian life that he could. Once a year he would commemorate the day of his arrest with a 'convict's day,' when he reverted to the diet of bread, broth and oats he ate in the labor camps. He rose early every day and wrote until dusk - producing, among other works, his novel-cycle The Red Wheel, a vast, Tolstoyan account of the Russian revolution that runs...
...lives of women like Dunne are the subject of an exhibition, "Women Transported: Life in Australia's Convict Female Factories," whose national tour opens Aug. 2 at the Parramatta Heritage Centre. Between 1804 and the early 1850s, some 10,000 British women served in one of the 12 female work houses - known as factories - in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Theirs is a tale of dislocation and suffering of which few Australians have more than the sketchiest knowledge, yet it's hardly stretching things to call these women the mothers of a nation, or to suggest...
...common misconception is that most of the convict women were illiterate whores from the criminal class. Not so, according to documents of the time. Prostitution wasn't illegal in Britain in the early part of the 19th century, so it wasn't grounds for transportation. The convicts were no more likely to be illiterate than the Britons who were coming to Australia by choice, and more than 60% of them were transported for a first offence, usually theft. Between them, they brought some 180 trade skills...
...breaking, spinning, needlework and laundry. Unlike their male counterparts, they were spared the lash. But they were not spared solitary confinement or the indignity of being gagged or having their head shaved for serious misconduct. Parramatta hosted Australia's first act of industrial defiance in 1827, when hundreds of convict women rioted over food...
...That the majority managed to stay sane and build a new life fascinates curator Hendriksen. In her own dark times, she says, she draws inspiration from the convict women, who would have thumbed their nose at authority and used humor and friendship to ward off despair. Writing for the catalog, she wonders why she and others are so interested in the convicts' stories: "Is it a sense of impotence of our effect, of our power to act in the world in a meaningful way? Are these women's stories a life affirmation to counteract the existential abyss that can sometimes...