Word: patchwork
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...unique and hopeful experiment in China's tightly controlled society. It was a place where everyone from political critics to whimsical poets could paste up wall posters, which are protected by China's 1978 constitution. Thousands of people sometimes came to the wall to read the patchwork quilt of personal grievances, sharply worded essays demanding more freedom, and short stories and poems. Last week the Municipal Revolutionary Committee of Peking, clearly acting at the direction of the Chinese Communist Party, issued a strict prohibition of all posters at the original site of democracy wall, thus effectively ending China...
...history of Italian painting or French literature or any other aspect of European culture. Americans are notorious in Europe for having no sense of history. This means that they do not grow up, as an Italian does, bombarded with dates and monuments and biographies. Every Italian town is a patchwork of architectural styles that children learn to identify. They are spoon-fea Church history, the history of the communist party, the history of the resistance, they memorize long lists of names and dates, and finally in high school they study both Italian and European history with great thoroughness...
...Shimon Peres immediately called for Begin himself to resign and hold new elections. Although Begin is highly unlikely to take that course, his position is seriously weakened. Not only does Dayan have a considerable personal following, but other recent defections have narrowed the parliamentary majority of Begin's patchwork conservative Likud coalition from 78 to 63 out of 120 seats...
...searchlights swept menacingly over the heavily guarded border between East and West Germany, a raggedy patchwork balloon, traveling at a leisurely 10 to 15 knots, floated across the wall of fortifications, minefields, self-firing explosives and guard towers. Minutes later, the bizarre craft crash-landed on West German soil. East Germans were aboard: Mechanic Hans Peter Strelczyk, Bricklayer Gunter Wetzel, their wives and four children. Once again, human ingenuity and the will to freedom had prevailed over Communist East Germany's determination to immure its citizens behind the most formidable frontier in history...
...fall. Its author, Frances FitzGerald, 38, examines America's view of itself as reflected in school history texts going back more than a century. Her conclusion: the once familiar tapestry of American history, long Waspish, pious and upbeat, has been ripped apart and converted into a glum, pluralistic patchwork. America and its view of the past are now changing so rapidly that few American schoolchildren in the future will share any common attitude toward their country's history. The books they read, now produced by committees, not historians, are loath to proclaim any values as self-evident, including...