Word: descent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Midwest, Berlin follows in detail Joplin's travels from his birthplace near Texarkana, Texas (his father Giles was a freed slave), through the bandstands and bordellos of the Mississippi to Tin Pan Alley, the budding popular-music scene in New York City. Berlin then recounts Joplin's syphilis-induced descent into madness, a deterioration that ended with his death in Manhattan in 1917 at age 49. Joplin earned a penny for each copy of The Maple Leaf Rag that was sold, but he died broke as a result of his creeping insanity and his quixotic efforts to publish and produce...
...wasn't until refrigerator-size boulders began hurtling down from above that the scientists sitting in an Anchorage, Alaska, control room started to get seriously worried. Until then the robot known as Dante II had successfully negotiated a steep, muddy descent and ambled unconcernedly through hot steam and poisonous gases. But even a 10-ft.-tall, 1,700-lb. automaton has its limits, and multiton chunks of rock moving at high speed were beyond Dante's. "That big one," said Carnegie Mellon University robotics expert John Bares, pointing nervously at a video screen after a rockslide, "would've wiped...
...Donald Payne of New Jersey. Jackson was the only representative from any of the other major black civil-rights organizations to show up. Chavis seemed to be alluding to absentees as well as critics when he declared, "The last time I checked my back, it was someone of African descent that put the dagger in and twisted...
Long before Rwanda's descent into chaos, Western donors had grown exhausted by the problems that beset sub-Saharan Africa: the ceaseless wars, ethnic violence, political turmoil, massive poverty and persistent famine. The region leads the world in the number of refugees and people displaced within their own country's borders, surpassing South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East combined...
...homes. The Madsens are doing big business in humanitarian food at their shipping terminal, and they own the country's main beer factory. To exploit lucrative foreign-exchange deals, two of the capital's leading families -- the Acras, who come from Syria, and the Bigios, who are of Jewish descent -- have joined forces to buy the local branch of the National Bank of Paris. "Six months from now, when all the small businessmen are dead," says an angry downtown entrepreneur, "they will be the ones controlling Haiti...