Word: railroad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seen as degenerate enemies of progress as the century went on and their resistance grew, and finally (by the 1890s) turning into doomed phantoms. Its landscapes are prodigious. Its stage material includes the Conestoga wagon, the simple cabin, the tepee, the isolated fort, the deep perspective V of the railroad -- and at the end, symbol of absolute victory over nature, the California sequoia with a road cut through its trunk...
...space shuttle, American industry still lives by the stodgier, workaday technology of the railroad. The proof: less than 24 hours after 235,000 railworkers went on strike last week against the nation's major freight rail companies, Congress, at the urging of President Bush, ordered the strikers back to work. Bush defended the action, saying that "the strike would cripple the economy and adversely affect national security." Some half million workers in the automobile and other rail-dependent industries faced layoffs within days of the aborted job action...
...railroad industry and 11 unions have been bargaining for years over wages, work rules and health care. Tentative agreements were reached with only three unions just before the strike deadline. In January a bipartisan board created by the White House called for salary hikes accompanied by increases in the mileage that crews must travel for a day's pay and in worker contributions to health-plan costs. Most unions opposed the board's recommendations as promanagement. That may not matter. A new board is being set up with the power, so far uninvoked, to impose a settlement...
...evil nurse in Misery doesn't chop her captive's foot off with an ax; she breaks it with a mallet. The heroine in Sleeping with the Enemy doesn't bravely confront her husband on her own terms; she cringes like a silent-film maiden tied to the railroad tracks. Plus ca change. Movies, even if they have literary beginnings, still need Hollywood endings...
...hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and their families who were forced off the fields of the Mississippi Delta after the widespread adoption of the mechanical cotton picker. Lured by the promise of decent pay in the North, they flowed upward along the lines of the Illinois Central Railroad, their ears ringing with the Bible accounts of the children of Israel making their way to the promised land...