Word: moment
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Capitalism is dying," theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued. "Let no one delude himself by hoping for reform from within." The American Communist Party believed its moment had come. "If I vote at all," social critic Lewis Mumford said, "it will be for the Communists." "The destruction of the Democratic Party," argued University of Chicago professor Paul Douglas (who would later become a pillar of the same party), "would be one of the best things that could happen in our political life." "The situation is critical," political analyst Walter Lippman warned Roosevelt two months before he took office. "You may have...
...Britain was ready to let India go. But the moment of Gandhi's greatest triumph, on August 15, 1947, was also the hour of his defeat. India gained freedom but lost unity when Britain granted independence on the same day it created the new Muslim state of Pakistan. Partition dishonored Gandhi's sect-blind creed. "There is no message at all," he said that day and turned to fasting and prayer...
...Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually the same moment, his great rival Picasso creates his equally masterly Cubist collage Still-Life with Chair Caning and Guitar, which reverses the centuries-old traditions of sculpture, focusing the spectator's eye not on the final effect but on the process and materials by which it is obtained...
...Stravinsky premieres his ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris, setting the audience into a riotous frenzy with his rhythms--violent syncopation, sudden changes of meter, "barbaric" repetitions--subverting everyone's expectations for a predictable and reassuring beat. We are but a moment from Wozzeck (1925) and on the way to banishing tonality itself from opera...
...costly wastefulness, yet embroiled England ineffectually in the long Continental struggles of the Counter-Reformation. When the Catholic threat of Spain reached its apogee in 1588, her penny pinching nearly cost England its independence before luck and the skill of her sailors defeated the Spanish armada. Yet at the moment of imminent invasion, she dressed in a silver breastplate to address her troops and imbue them with her dauntless courage. "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," Elizabeth said, "but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England...