Word: nineteenth
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Latter-day sociobiologists cannot contest the impact that Spencer's sociology-biology had on nineteenth-century society. The Social Darwinism of the time, much of which was rooted in Spencer's principles, gained popular acceptance and provided a handy justification for the status quo and for a repudiation of state interference on behalf of society's welfare. Because Spencer's society was evolving naturally, any such tampering would result in disaster. These theories, embraced by upper and middle classes alike in America, provided these classes with a rationale for opposing all social reform. The phrase "survival of the fittest," taken...
...Truffaut's most visually luscious films. Sometimes, Adele is beautiful, though more often she is too concerned with her emotions to care about her looks and her face is tearful and puffy. But the rest of the characters, and all the scenery, is a catalogue of splendor. Truffaut's nineteenth century Halifax is magnificent inside and out, from the lichen-crusted castle battlements to the oak interiors of the houses and the cozy Victorian bookshop. The climax of the film--in Barbados--is more exotic, but here too the emphasis is on beauty, even when the camera moves in crowds...
...queen of the genre--has neither the suspense of a good spy story or the nose-to-the-ground clue-tracking of a murder mystery, and has no social significance whatsoever. Heyer deals exclusively with the frivolous world of England's Upper Ten Thousand at the turn of the nineteenth century, and any similarity between the world of social conventions and affected mannerisms she describes and the one we live in is purely coincidental...
FROM THE ONSET of industrialization in the late nineteenth century, Spain was the only European country where the Anarchists flourished. Marxist socialism was a "civilized" import that came later, hailing the eventual benefits of modernization and preaching gradualism. But landless Andulusian Farm hands and Catalonian textile workers were Anarchists until 1939--they dreamed of a collective society run by ordinary people and not by petty officials. The Socialists and Communists controlled Madrid during the Civil War, and the city knew no internal disorder. In Barcelona, where Anarchist workers held sway, there was revolution...
...worry about. At any rate, judging from The Pedagogues, the place hasn't become much more or less inspirational in the last 75 years. People in The Pedagogues a spend a lot of time walking around Cambridge buying things, sitting around in the Yard, and going to the nineteenth-century equivalent of mixers, just like they do now. The people are a little different in The Pedagogues--mostly older than college age, or else Harvard students trying to extract themselves from the academic straits their excesses during the school year have brought them into--but the ambience seems the same...