Word: mississippi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ORLEANS IS SINKING AT THE rate of one inch every year. The city is built over hundreds of feet of soft black mud, deposited there, over thousands of years, by the Mississippi. The mud comes from the Midwest, all the way uup to Minnesota, along with the tourist hordes who contribute their dollars and their considerable collective weight to the city's inexorable descent towards Australia. When we were there, mind you, most of the buildings were still very much visible. The locals, for their part, seemed unconcerned about the dreadful fate awaiting them in just a few brief moments...
...stand on the levee near Jackson Square in the French Quarter, you can see the Mississippi flowing by at about seven feet above street level. It's a big, brown, mean-looking river, just waiting for the next hurricane to sweep away all the pretty, shabby stucco buildings with their fancy wrought iron balconies. Local people know this, just as they know that the city is sinking under their feet and that there aren't many jobs around now that all the oil and chemical companies are going under. But they don't seem to care much. They keep sinking...
...East Side, staged bitter fights to block the building of local McDonald's outlets. Stung by such criticism, McDonald's has tried to make its presence more welcome in recent years by toning down its garish yellow arches and designing restaurants that insinuate themselves into the neighborhood. On the Mississippi River in St. Louis, a McDonald's is housed in a floating reproduction of an 1880s side-wheeler, complete with brass-trimmed chandeliers...
...time is the mid-1990s, and Dr. Tom More has returned home to Feliciana parish, that swath of Louisiana land running "from the Mississippi to the Pearl, from the thirty-first parallel to the Crayola blue of Lake Pontchartrain." More (a prominent, visionary presence in Love in the Ruins) has spent two years in a minimum-security federal prison in Alabama for peddling uppers and downers. "I needed the money," he tells the two physician friends who have been charged with overseeing his probation. Now Tom, alcoholism temporarily in control, needs to resume his psychiatric practice. The trouble...
...1960s civil rights movement. While volunteering in the local office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she became aware that there were no attorneys to represent poor blacks. She went off to Yale Law School, then became the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. As a staff attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she met her husband Peter, a fellow attorney and an adviser to Senator Robert Kennedy. Convinced she could achieve more as an advocate than as a litigant for the poor, Edelman moved to Washington in 1968 and five...