Word: goldings
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...births are incredible moments, but some are more momentous than others. When citizens of the British colony called the Gold Coast gathered to witness the founding of their new nation a half-century ago, they carried not only their personal hopes and fears but also the aspirations of a continent. As the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break away from its foreign master in the post-1945 era of independence, Ghana was the symbol of a land throwing off its shackles, the first breeze of what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would later dub "the wind of change...
Kwame is sprightly for his age. When I first met him in April last year, he was wearing loose-fitting gold-colored trousers, a gold shirt and a small gold skullcap, all made from the same embroidered fabric. He welcomed me into his modest rented home on the eastern edge of Accra, Ghana's capital, pumping my hand with the energy and strength of a man 20 years younger. The living room was painted electric blue, and a gold vase of plastic flowers sat on the coffee table. There was a small television in the corner and a telephone that...
Back in the U.S., it took only a year after the discovery of gold to turn the sleepy little town of San Francisco into a boisterous city, the largest place west of Chicago. Modern California was born. More important, the Gold Rush was a ratification of the most fantastical version of the American Dream, the yearning for instant fortune and easy prosperity, for extreme liberty and land free for the taking from the natives. When they heard the news out of California, Marx and Engels understood that this bizarre phenomenon was another way in which the U.S. might not conform...
Consider all that happened in the first remarkable months at the beginning of 1848. On Jan. 24, gold was discovered accidentally on a river in Northern California--the first fleck of what would quickly become more than a thousand tons. Nine days later, a treaty was signed ending the U.S. war with Mexico--our first elective war, first imperial war--in one stroke extending the U.S. from the Texas border to the Pacific. At the same moment in London, meanwhile, a 29-year-old German philosopher named Karl Marx and his 27-year-old textile manufacturer friend Friedrich Engels published...
...late 1840s that the archetypal American migration, wagons of pioneers rolling into the West, began in earnest. What had been an insignificant trickle of immigrants in the early '40s, only dozens a year, increased 10 or 20 times during the middle of the decade, and then, with the Gold Rush, by more than another order of magnitude in 1849 alone. And just as the Western exodus reached full speed, American cities became true modern metropolises. In 1800, New York had only 60,000 people, but by the middle of the century, the population had grown to half a million. Filling...