Word: insularity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fiercely proud, tribally insular Afrikaner elite faces an increasingly irreconcilable dilemma: how to avoid massive civil unrest and bloodshed without relinquishing at least some power to the overwhelmingly nonwhite majority. The 2½-year-old government of Prime Minister P.W. Botha, 65, has tried to make a beginning by limiting discriminatory practices like segregation at public facilities, lifting bans against mixed sports and recognizing some black trade unions. But even these tentative reforms have angered many whites and set off a spasm of soul searching over the future course of the country that provides so much chromium, manganese, platinum...
...interesting case. Saroyan was born in Fresno, son of Armenian refugees who fled the Turkish massacres at the beginning of the century. He knew the wrench of separation and the insular poverty of California's little Armenias: Saroyan's early years were spent in an orphanage after his father died and his mother had to work full time. Like the young bringer of good news and bad in his screenplay turned novel The Human Comedy, Saroyan began his working life as a telegraph boy. When his short story The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze...
...acknowledges an abbreviation of outward detail. He prepares us quickly for our journey into William Ellery Channing's mind; we learn in six taut paragraphs that he graduated from Harvard with a gift for oratory and sailed for Virginia in November, 1798, where he grew less sociable and more insular in Richmond as he searched for direction and purpose in his life. Five years later he had decided on a career in the ministry, and spent the rest of his life trying to work out the dilemmas of self and society...
...music, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. The initial edition was titled A Dictionary of Music and Musicians by Eminent Writers, English and Foreign. The word "foreign" was a bit patronizing; of the 118 contributors listed in that four-volume edition, 102 were British. This reflected the insular judgment of the founding editor, a nonmusician named George Grove, one of those versatile achievers of whom the Victorian Age was justly proud. Sir George, a civil engineer, built lighthouses in Jamaica and Bermuda and worked on the British railway system. He was a self-taught Bible and music scholar...
...Republican hit list includes Majority Leader Jim Wright of Texas, Majority Whip John Brademas of Indiana, Caucus Chairman Thomas Foley of Washington, National Congressional Committee Chairman James Corman of California, Interior and Insular Affairs Committee Chairman Morris Udall of Arizona, and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Al Ullman of Oregon. The Vander Jagt committee has found formidable candidates to run against all of them, and is backing each of its nominees with $21,000 in campaign cash and advice on strategy, opponents' weaknesses...