Word: epochal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...says, "is not a raft tossed by the winds and waves of historical forces over which it has little control. Its dynamic power, physical and ideological, generates historical forces; what it does or does not do makes a great deal of difference to the history of man in this epoch...
Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov. This revival of a prehumous (1938) novel, although a mere Pninprick compared to the author's subsequent slash, foreshadows the maturer talent in describing a middle-aged Berlin art dealer of The Blue Angel epoch, whose life and dignity are degraded by a woman...
...staircase wept and pressed against each other." It was a blow from which Soviet literature has never quite recovered, for Mayakovsky was the unchallenged laureate of the revolution. A critic named Josef Stalin flatly acclaimed him as "the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch...
Geologists divide the earth's history into a sequence of periods: Permian, Jurassic, etc. But seldom do they agree on the age of each period, and a particularly annoying question mark is the Pleistocene, an epoch of intermittent ice ages during which man became true man. The geological dating system that uses the decay of uranium and other radioactive elements to tell the age of very ancient rocks is much too vague for the comparatively short Pleistocene. Dating by carbon 14, which is fine for recent times, reaches back only 60,000 years-not nearly enough...
...greatly helped change that situation. He had speculated about evolution some years before Origin of Species was published, and in the five years after it exploded on the world (in 1859), Huxley exploded with it by issuing 46 major publications on subjects ranging from the fishes of the Devonian epoch to the New Labyrinthodonts from the Edinburgh coalfield. With a "basilisk artistry" on the lecture platform and "a certain ruthlessness," Huxley loved to bandy texts and split hairs with the theologians. He signed letters in mock church Latin, was "Father-in-Science" to disciples, and called himself the episcopophagous (bishop...