Word: diderot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every volume was a bestseller. The tenth, Rousseau and Revolution, won a 1968 Pulitzer Prize. Yet the very qualities that helped sell his books often earned the sneers of scholars. He gave history's eccentrics (Casanova, Caligula) more than their due. He was often glib ("Voltaire + Rousseau = Diderot"). On the other hand, he was capable of aphoristic wisdom that any academician would envy ("A nation is born Stoic, dies Epicurean...
Many of the bones required a high order of scientific sleuthing. In 1978 one of Webb's students, Diderot Gicca, came up with a jawbone that totally baffled the team. Careful study showed it to be part of a hitherto unknown giant ancestor of the raccoon. Students also found a mastodon, an ancestral kin of the elephant, with two pairs of tusks, the lower ones resembling shovels. For a time, they were also puzzled by what seemed an unusually large (nearly 3 ft.) metacarpal bone. It belonged to a creature called Aepycamelus major, the giraffe camel. No less surprising...
...Diderot's Rhetoric of the Living Machine--Prof. Aram Vartanian, New York University; Boylston Library...