Word: pawns
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...king and court of Shakespeare's Elsinore, argues Author West, represent all governments, all men. Nobody has clean hands. Ophelia is usually presented on the stage as a convent-type sweetie who has a nervous breakdown; in fact she is just "a disreputable young woman," a docile pawn in her father's plot to match her with Eligible Bachelor Hamlet. "No line in the play suggests that she felt either passion or affection for him." Even the ghost of Hamlet's father is tainted, as Author West sees it: he is the voice of the past...
Died. Erie Palmer Halliburton, 65, cranky, crusty farm-boy-to-riches oil tycoon, inventor of new methods of oil-well cementing (his "jet mixer" paved the way for mass production of well casings); after a three-year lung illness; in Los Angeles. Once so broke his wife had to pawn her wedding ring, Halliburton got his break in 1919 when he controlled a wild oil well for the late Oklahoma Wildcatter "Wild Bill" Skelly. formed his own company in 1920 (the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co. last year grossed $176,464,666), spread his empire into many fields, including pioneer...
Mohammed the Prophet never wanted to see Damascus, because "one Paradise is enough," but within three years of his death in 632, his followers surged out of the desert and seized Damascus. Under the Ommiad Caliphs, Syria, so long a pawn, became the heart of an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Punjab. Enlightened and energetic, Syria's new rulers drained the country's marshes, irrigated her steppe, gave Damascus a water system-still functioning-and converted the Byzantine Church of St. John the Baptist into one of Islam's great shrines, the Ommiad Mosque...
...with the fall of the Ommiad caliphate in 750 and the shift of the Arab imperial capital to Baghdad, Syria once again became a pawn, subjected to the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Crusaders, the Mongols of Hulagu Khan and, finally, in 1516, the Ottoman Turks. Not until World War I, when Lawrence of Arabia and Sherif Hussein of Mecca set Arab nationalism ablaze, did ravaged Syria at last emerge from the long night of Ottoman rule. And then, at the moment when the Arabs thought the land at last theirs, they discovered that the British...
...shins. Said Knight: "The Republican Party in California has two potential contenders for the presidency of the U.S. in 1960, both able and distinguished men. The governor's office is far too important to the welfare of the people of this state to be allowed to become a pawn in the presidential contest. No candidate should be pressed by his political advisers to seek the governorship of California for temporary use as an interim steppingstone to any other office...