Word: greats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...speech, Nixon abandoned the politics of conciliation, raising his voice to deliver a powerful, simplistic appeal, a personal plea to "the great silent majority" to back his Viet Nam policies and give him more time to carry out his chosen course. Three Presidents before him, said Nixon, had recognized the stakes in Viet Nam, and he did not intend to preside over a U.S. defeat. What he had done, he explained, was to begin "a pursuit for peace on many fronts"-including private proposals for a settlement that he initiated even before taking office, and a personal letter sent...
...James in 1881. "It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent." Were he alive today, James, a connoisseur of cities, might easily say the same thing about New York or Paris or Tokyo, for the great city is one of the paradoxes of history. In countless different ways, it has almost always been an unpleasant, disagreeable, cheerless, uneasy and reproachful place; in the end, it can only be described as magnificent...
Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world; according to the Bible, it was "the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful...
...despite everything, including itself, the truly great city is the stuff of legends and stories and a place with an ineradicable fascination. After cataloguing the horrors of life in imperial Rome, Urban Historian Lewis Mumford adds, almost reluctantly, that "when the worst has been said about urban Rome, one further word must be added: to the end, men loved...
What inspires such love and pulls people to the great cities? What indeed is a great city? It is almost easier to say what it is not. Except for its wealthy elites, great cities do not always provide easy or gracious living; lesser communities are almost always more comfortable. Juvenal could have walked peacefully in any number of attractive provincial cities. The average resident of one of Britain's planned new towns lives better than his counterpart in London. Yet London, notes Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperative, was a great city "even when the food was terrible...