Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...little more than physical displacement. Compare the films of the early space age with the sci-fi of today. Compare 2001 with Robocop, Close Encounters with The Terminator. Compare John Kennedy's thrilling pledge to race to the moon with . . . what? No politician talks that way anymore. The new frontier is not the moon. It's HMOs...
...more than salvage a telescope that has cost taxpayers $2.7 billion (including the $693 million repair bill for Endeavour's house call). The astronauts also created a kind of time warp. For a few days, America was back in the 1960s, an era when space was a grand frontier to be tamed, and when NASA's technical brilliance and right-stuff bravado made the agency seem virtually unstoppable as it sent men into orbit and on to the moon...
Such nativist sentiments only grew after the Civil War. The once vast frontier seemed less vast, and economic recessions raised fears that cheap foreign laborers might take American jobs. There was also the openly racist argument that some newcomers, Asians especially, could not be "assimilated." In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, imposing a head tax and excluding whole categories of people -- convicts and the mentally ill, for example. For the first time there were real limits on European immigration. Twelve years later, a group calling itself the Immigration Restriction League adopted the pseudo science of eugenics...
...ways that were hardly conceivable even a generation ago, the new world order is a version of the New World writ large: a wide-open frontier of polyglot terms and postnational trends. A common multiculturalism links us all -- call it Planet Hollywood, Planet Reebok or the United Colors of Benetton. Taxi and hotel and disco are universal terms now, but so too are karaoke and yoga and pizza. For the gourmet alone, there is tiramisu at the Burger King in Kyoto, echt angel-hair pasta in Saigon and enchiladas on every menu in Nepal...
...newcomers were from Eastern and Southern Europe: Russian Jews, Poles, Italians and Greeks. They too left the Old World to escape poverty and, in the case of the Jews, persecution. Like their predecessors, they were mostly peasants, but they faced a different and unhappy prospect. The great era of frontier settlement was coming to an end. After being processed at Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay and other immigration centers, millions of these rural folk found themselves confined to the mean streets of urban ghettos like Manhattan's , festering Lower East Side, working at menial jobs and crammed into...