Word: oblivion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vice Chairman of the Communist Party. This adds significantly to the power Teng acquired last year when he again became a member of the Politburo. Except for Chou, no one else holds such an influential combination of state and party posts. Yet only 21 months ago, Teng was in oblivion. Denounced by the Cultural Revolution's Red Guards in 1966 as the "No. 2 capitalist roader," he was forced to give up his duties as Vice Premier and General Secretary of the party. He was reduced from one of the half a dozen or so most important figures...
...early wars for women's liberation, even the heroines tended to remain unknown soldiers. Perhaps it was partly the fear of oblivion that made Mary Wollstonecraft sit down late in 1791 and in six weeks write the 300 pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Earlier that year, she had broken out of a shell of ladylike anonymity to print a bylined edition of her previously unsigned pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Man. It was a loosely reasoned but passionate answer to Edmund Burke's reservations about the French Revolution. It made Mary Wollstonecraft...
...Hendrix and the Clapton sound, the high-tension, raging, hostile, exciting music that lashed out at something and died, or went the many strange ways its listeners did. The rock that succeeded it kept up the noise but lost the content. Sometimes it tried to club people into oblivion, deaden their senses (great with quaaludes). Or it tried to take people into an abstract other-world, a zillion steps past mere escape. Or it turned the great strength of the music--its implicit threat to the existing order--into a parody of itself, dressing up in paint and feather boas...
Only an accident saved this astonishing narrative from oblivion. In 1969, Theodore Rosengarten, a young Amherst graduate, and a friend were doing research on a sharecroppers' union that surfaced briefly in Alabama during the Depression. Visiting the state, they stumbled across Nate Shaw, then 84, a onetime union member who had served twelve years in prison for resisting the trumped-up confiscation of a neighbor's property back in 1932. A single question, "Why did you join the union?" spurred the black man into an eight-hour answer. More than 120 hours of taped reminiscences eventually followed...
...Agnew-style. Indeed, Illinois Republican Congressman John Anderson offered a cutting observation last week. "Why were we ever stupid enough to think that this awful man would fade away like one of MacArthur's old soldiers?" he asked. "He was always going to be dragged kicking and screaming into oblivion...