Word: fire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sometimes incredulous now at 1968, not only at the astonishing sequence of events, but at the intensity, the energy in the air. People lived their lives, of course. And yet the air of public life seemed to be on fire, and that public fire singed the private self. Revolutionary bombast gusted across the wake of elegy for something in America that had got lost, some sense of national innocence and virtue. More than in ordinary times, people thought about death, about spiritual fulfillment, and about transfiguration...
...social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the complex reverberant life that the '60s would have in the American mind long after the melodrama was over and those previously on fire went to tend their gardens...
Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. The nation's cities caught fire. Out of the ashes came new stirrings for change...
Despite pleas for calm from his widow Coretta Scott King, blacks throughout urban America turned to violence. "When white America killed Dr. King, she declared war," said radical Stokely Carmichael. The nation's cities -- at least 125 in 28 states -- caught fire. Washington, Chicago, Baltimore and Kansas City, were hardest hit. More than 65,000 federal troops were required to quell the disorders, which raged for a week...
...year was a series of national traumas. After Tet, Americans suffered in their living rooms as more than 5,000 U.S. Marines held out for weeks after being surrounded at Khe Sanh, a redoubt in the chilly, wet South Vietnamese highlands. The heroism under heavy fire reminded many of the French troops who surrendered in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. But the Marines did not surrender. In March, Westmoreland was replaced as U.S. commander in South Viet Nam by General Creighton Abrams. President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. In the same month, whispers spread...