Word: historians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...economic historian Joel Mokyr, stressing this sort of international synergy, has attributed Europe's Industrial Revolution to "chains of inspiration" by which one idea sparked another. But, as we've seen, chains of inspiration had been vital to the whole history of technical advance, even the glacial process by which the stone flake inspired the inventor of the stone knife. What was new was how fast the chains were being forged, even across great distances...
...defeated the Scandinavians, rushed south again with 7,000 troops, William was outside Hastings. "For God's sake, spare not," he told his men. His well-deployed knights and archers eventually overwhelmed the exhausted Anglo-Saxon infantry. "The living marched over the heaps of the dead," wrote an early historian. By nightfall, Harold was slain...
...apparent incoherence, his strangeness. He kept minutely detailed account books, for example--he was an obsessive record keeper who made daily notes on everything from barometric readings to the progress of 29 varieties of vegetables at Monticello--yet he somehow lost track of his debts and died bankrupt. The historian Paul Johnson has catalogued a few of the inconsistencies: Jefferson was an elitist who complained bitterly of elites; a humorless man whose favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy; a soft-spoken intellectual sometimes given to violent, inflammatory language ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time...
...declared, of "maniac ambition"; he added "Having been, like him, entrusted with the happiness of my country, I feel the blessing of resembling him in no other point"). Jefferson stitched together popular sovereignty and liberty, all under divine sponsorship and legitimized by ancient precedent and English tradition. Writes the historian Merrill Peterson: "For the first time in history, 'the rights of man,' not of rulers, were laid at the foundation of a nation. The first great Colonial revolt perforce became the first great democratic revolution as well...
...they went on to discredit not only fascism but communism as well, that strength still came at a terrible cost. "How much happier a world it would be if one did not have to mount crusades against racism, segregation, a Holocaust, the extermination of 'inferior peoples,'" notes presidential historian Robert Dallek. "We don't need evil. We'd do fine without Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Think of the amount of money and energy used in World War II--if only they could have been used in constructive ways. Good doesn't need evil. We'd be just as well...