Word: puritanism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most worthy object of historical study is human consciousness. His concern is not for the great systembuilders and the source of their thought, but for the vitality and diffusion of ideas themselves. His archives are the libraries of second-rate thinkers. For example, he ransacked the effects of the Puritan ministers and aldermen for evidence for his major work, Religion and the American Mind. The Idea has for Heimert a life of its own, conditioned by the physical furniture of reality but also conditioning it. He has little patience with historians who insist that "objective reality" exist, that it alone...
Venezuelans are not surprised by Caldera's confident beginning, since he entered the presidency better prepared than any other predecessor-a preparation that included a spell in a previous coalition Cabinet. Caldera, 53, is an immensely capable lawyer with a puritan dedication to work and a manifest sincerity that compensates for an apparent lack of warmth and humor in public. Acutely conscious of public relations, he holds weekly televised press conferences, and, taking a cue from Richard Nixon, introduced his Cabinet to the voters...
...year 1692 was a very bad year for the town of Salem, Mass. During a summer of superstitious hysteria, grim events took place there that have permanently tarnished the popular American memory of its Puritan past. According to widely accepted tradition, the whole thing was whipped up by Cotton Mather and the lesser clergymen of a frowning theocracy. Before it was over, the story goes, 19 men and women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result...
Whether this emptiness is to be viewed with fear, hope or a confusing combination of both depends largely on the state of the reader's nerves. The explosion of puritan values-be they Christian or Jewish-has created an army of walking wounded who worry not only about whether they should be enjoying the pleasures of debt and sex, but also about whether or not they are hypocrites if they do. The result is often a pervading sense of absurdity...
...things to see, and girls to meet. "Everyone should have the right to go to heaven or hell in his own way," he says. Hefner himself is trying for heaven. What is more, the mass producer of plastic-wrapped sex, the purveyor of pop hedonism, the great anti-Puritan who is out to make every square feel that he too can be a swinger, is looking for a heaven less in the style of Playboy than the Saturday Evening Post. "You know," says Hef wistfully, "in the next ten years I would rather meet a girl and fall in love...