Word: nationalizes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...English had to pay taxes on the windows in their houses. When another kind of window tax was proposed in Hartford, Conn., last year, the good citizens responded enthusiastically. The beneficiary of the revenue, after all, was not the British war chest but a restoration fund for the nation's oldest statehouse, a building that dates back to 1796. The method of taxation was unorthodox: $5 for every window with a view of the historic building...
...three-story federal-style structure of red brick and stone, the Old State House in downtown Hartford was designed by the new nation's foremost architect, Charles Bulfinch, who later did extensive work on the nation's Capitol. Having served as the seat of state government from 1796 to 1878 and the city hall from 1879 to 1915, the building was declared a landmark in 1960 and turned into a museum of Connecticut history. Since then, however, maintenance funds have been scarce, and city officials began to talk of razing the deteriorating edifice to make way for office...
Although the river, the town and the nation of the book are not named, a compact and teeming world is irresistibly realized. There are those special breeds of Levantines and Greeks who stick it out on the ragged edges of free enterprise; the inevitable scholars, priests and primitive-art collectors; old servants who have made parasitism an honorable profession; and promising young men who will go directly from dugout to jet. The economy of the town remains fairly simple. Villagers from the bush sell smoked monkey meat to steamer passengers. The money is used to buy pots, cloth and razor...
...doing without schools, parks, hospitals, street lighting and such could scarcely enter a civilized mind. The ever wandering human species recognized roads as obvious necessities soon after man began meandering across the earth. Later, mechanical wonders that aided travel were put in the same category. Today every ranking industrial nation nurtures the use of cars, buses and airplanes. Along with these, railroads are treated as indispensable in every well-developed country-except...
...amazing exception happens to be the U.S., a nation that pioneered in railroading with more vigor and daring than any other in the 19th century. It also did so on a grander scale, binding an immense continent with tracks and producing trains of such magnificence that they moved Nathaniel Hawthorne to exclaim: "They spiritualize travel!" Most Americans once agreed, and even today travelers lucky enough to wind up on a good train find this way of traveling superior in every way to the fumes and peeves of the throughways and the sardine-can intimacy of the time-rupturing jet planes...