Word: durant
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...best of all Sloan's bearing customers was William Crapo Durant, who was trying to assemble a motley collection of auto companies into a corporation he called General Motors. Durant was also tying his suppliers together as United Motors Corp., bought Hyatt for $13.5 million as part of United. Durant had taken such a fancy to Sloan that he hired him to become United's president. United was eventually merged into General Motors and Durant was ousted by the Du Pont family, already large G.M. stockholders. New President Pierre S. Du Pont asked Sloan to stay as operations...
...world has both favored and feared the philosophers' answers. Thomas Aquinas became a saint, Aristotle was tutor to Alexander the Great, and Voltaire was a confidant of kings. But Socrates was put to death, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. Nowadays, Historian Will Durant has noted, no one would think of doing that-"not because men are more delicate about killing, but because there is no need to kill that which is already dead...
...volume of a projected trilogy, The A mericans: the National Experience, defined the driving American character as it developed between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Samuel Eliot Morison's 1,150-page The Oxford History of .'he American People was impressive but quirky. Will a, d Ariel Durant's series on Western civilization continued to be a marvel of readable scholarship with the Age of Voltaire, and Kenneth Stampp's Era of Reconstruction put the blame back on the South's unreconstructed rebels instead of on all those Yankee carpetbaggers. Among minor but intriguing miscellany...
Historians Will Durant, 79, and his wife Ariel, 67, are commenting on Voltaire, but this quote could also serve as a fair estimate of the Durants' own achievement in this, the ninth and penultimate volume of their Story of Civilization, a spirited march through history begun 30 years and 8,000 pages ago. For in The Age of Voltaire (1715-1756), the Durants have clearly come upon a kindred soul, and often agreeably identify with the great French gadfly...
Another Matter. Like Voltaire, Will Durant was a Jesuitic dropout, and he finds in Voltaire an early and pristine mirror of "the decline of religious belief begetting the pessimism that would be the secret malady of the modern soul." With his ferocious assault on Christianity in a thousand plays, poems, stories, letters and polemical tracts, Voltaire accelerated more than any single man the decline of the church's authority in the 18th century...