Word: missions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...great fact to be learned about about American history, the idea that moves any study of the American mind, is this: that America was begun on purpose, that it began deliberately, for a reason. This sense of mission, first religious, then political, has persisted from the beginning. Perry Miller has defined the mission for colonial New England in his rich metaphor of an errand into the wilderness. Seeing a play on the word "errand," he has explained how the first Puritan settlers came to America running one sort of errand, for a higher power--the Puritan Church in England...
...Alan Heimert explore this peculiar Messianic conception Americans have of their own history. The authors organize their material into three major categories: 1. "The quest for national unity and identity." 2. The impact of industrialism on an agrarian state. 3. "The transformation of the nation's original sense of mission to its present sense of responsibility...." Each of these categories is treated in a single chapter, and the entire book runs only to 155 pages. Such brevity on so sweeping a theme creates difficulties. The authors present their work in a wonderfully clear, concise style, but often their conciseness serves...
...should not prevent the Cuban exiles from raiding their island homeland. From the standpoint of our own self-preservation and our belief in the cause of freedom, we should be helping them. These Cubans are on a valiant mission to free their countrymen from Communist control...
...construction. Thresher's teardrop-shaped hull had no flat surfaces; when venturing on her deck, crewmen wore special adhesive shoe soles. The hull was speckled with more than 1,000 tiny listening devices. She could travel 60,000 miles without refueling, stay out three months without support. The mission for which Thresher was built: to seek out enemy submarines with her keen underwater ears and destroy them...
Spiegel, a man whose self-made vision of his mission is clear and explicit, is serenely unperturbed by such minor rebellions. "The producer's job is to conceive a picture, to dream it up, to have the first concept of what a film is going to be like when it is finished, before a word is written, a part is cast, a director thought of. Most of the pictures I have made in recent years have come out quite close to the way I conceived them...