Word: feudal
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...anthology of African Negro music to be found on commercial phonograph records. Much of this music shows rhythmic resemblances to jazz, includes drums, flutes, xylophones and chanting by long-headed Congo Negroes, by the Mambuti Pygmies, and by the Watusi. a race of 7-ft. African giants living as feudal chiefs in what was formerly German Tanganyika. The Pygmies sing repetitious melodies in the manner of change-ringers, each one hooting his single note in turn. The Babira Negroes of the Ituri Forest punctuate the high-pitched gargling of their soloist with aggressive whoops. The Watusi Drummers hammer an intense...
Tracing this distinction from the feudal period to the totalitarian state, with a vast display of scholarship, innumerable quotations, occasional flashes of bitter humor, Dr. Vagts includes two brilliant sections that might well be reprinted as separate volumes. One is a provocative analysis of the pre-War German army, its officers split into snobbish cliques, undermining the plans of their rivals without regard for the cost of human life. The other is a soberly inspiring appraisal of Washington as a military genius who is almost unique in history in that he had no militaristic ambitions. Net conclusion...
...Kentucky-born Caroline Gordon belongs to that well-educated guerrilla band of Southern regionalists who about a decade ago took up where the Confederate Army left off in its fight against the Yankee cultural and economic invasion. Chief sallies have consisted of nostalgic biographies, fiction and poetry celebrating the feudal charm of the Old South, collective manifestoes (I Take My Stand) advocating return to an agrarian economy, magazines (The Southern Review et al.) and poetry societies whose interests are about equally divided between the high brow and the horny hand. To this rebel activity Caroline Gordon has contributed a five...
...MINSTREL BOY-L. A. G. Strong- Knopf ($3.75). The middle half of the 18th Century, in Europe, was a kind of waiting time. Artistically an awkward bridge between classicism and the fierce romantics, politically a feudal afternoon of dying magnificence, it was a Golden Age gone tinsel without anyone quite realizing the change. Good and bad, wealth and poverty, freedom and tyranny seemed to have struck a permanent balance. It was a time of elaborate facades and filthy backstreets, of nearsighted perceptions and long-range emotions. If a gentleman, posting hastily through the slums, had a tear...
Ridden by heavy taxes and a feudal system of landlordism, pinched by the British corn laws (which put a high tariff on imported grain, in favor of England's home-grown wheat), the Irish had been reduced to practical subsistence on the potato, and when that crop failed whole counties were left literally foodless. Governmental remedial machinery was slow, graft-ridden, stupidly conceived. While the famine lasted. 21,770 people died of starvation, the total Irish mortality for the five years that ended in 1851 was close upon a million. The two most important results were: a desperate stiffening...