Word: prussian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fact, has long been something of a demographic exception in Europe. Its birthrate started to drop in the late 18th century, and over the course of the 19th century it was the French who worried as the British and Germans bred like rabbits. Prussia's victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 strengthened the idea that having babies was a patriotic duty, an idea compounded by the national trauma of World War I, which cost France 10% of its working-age male population. Well before Marshal Pétain placed the Vichy regime under the slogan of "work...
...legend has it, a French artist named Claude Monet walked into a food shop in Amsterdam, where he had gone to escape the Prussian siege of Paris. There he spotted some Japanese prints being used as wrapping paper. He was so taken by the engravings that he bought one on the spot. The purchase changed his life - and the history of Western...
Americans entered into this pattern of yuletide dissimilitude largely through the effort of a Prussian-born engraver named Louis Prang. Often dubbed the "father of the American Christmas card," Prang started manufacturing cards for the American market in 1875. The practice of exchanging greeting cards with holiday newsletters during Christmas time quickly became popular, as it remains so to this day. While as early as the 1840s some Americans were already sending out cards, the custom grew greatly with Prang’s efforts...
...doctrine of realism, or its Prussian-accented cousin realpolitik, emphasizes a hard-nosed focus on clearly defined national interests, such as economic or security goals, pursued with a pragmatic calculation of commitments and resources. Idealism, on the other hand, emphasizes moral values and ideals, such as spreading democracy, and is apt to be more crusading and sentimental in its willingness to pay any price and bear any burden. Adherents of the second cliché argue that these days there is little distinction between the two because spreading democracy is in our economic and security interest. Our difficulties in Iraq, however, show...
...there’s a truncated edition of Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War,” the book jacket of which asks itself the obvious question before promptly providing an answer: “What can a nineteenth-century Prussian general teach a twenty-first century executive or entrepreneur about business strategy? Everything!” And who could forget the classic “The Change Monster,” whose premise goes “change is a monster that can’t be slain, but it can be made less...