Word: railroading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...popular quackeries of the day: seances, psychic remedies, a bottled "elixir of life." Inspired, she said, by a vision of Demosthenes, Woodhull and her sister went to New York and arranged to introduce themselves to the newly widowed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, 84. With her "magnetic treatment" Tennessee soothed the railroad tycoon so successfully that he backed the young sisters in opening a lucrative stock brokerage. In 1870, at 31, Victoria announced she was running for President. To argue her cause, she started her own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which favored, among other things, free love, tax reform...
...railroad for sale? It may sound like a game of Monopoly, but the Department of Transportation last week was taking bids for the Consolidated Rail Corp. Created in 1976 from the Penn Central and five other bankrupt railroads, Conrail required a $7 billion federal transfusion through 1982. Under the stewardship of Chairman L. Stanley Crane, Conrail earned a profit in 1983 of $313 million. When DOT tried to peddle Conrail to 20 firms last spring, the only offer came from the company's employees, who already own 15% of the road. But last week 14 bidders stepped forward...
...grandniece. He devised a similar character, and fictitious dialogue, to report a speech at New York University by Nobel-Prizewinning Poet Czeslaw Milosz. Reid's explanation: using a fictional persona helped him overcome writer's block. Personae, such as "our man Stanley," and pseudonyms, such as the railroad buff "E.M. Frimbo," are common devices in "Talk...
...discipline is particularly evident in the books' capsule architectural notes (color-coded blue) on outstanding buildings, a subject often neglected by other guides. The NYC Access entry on the design of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel ("an understated and elegantly detailed composition") reports such esoteric details as the underground railroad station from which Franklin Roosevelt was whisked to his suite by a secret elevator. The books abound in learned footnotes and pleasant trivia (the pianist at the Waldorf's Peacock Alley uses an instrument once owned by Cole Porter, who lived in the hotel). New York restaurant critiques...
...Freer exhibition is a fascinating show, for its context as well as its contents. Charles Lang Freer, who made his millions in rolling stock in the boom railroad years of the late 19th century, was an impassioned Orientalist, a disciple of the "Boston bonzes," chiefly of Ernest Fenollosa. As Bernard Berenson fanned the ardor of the American rich for the Italian Renaissance, so Fenollosa was busy shaping American taste for Oriental art. He adored Whistler's work, calling him "the nodule, the universalizer, the interpreter of East to West." Freer concurred, and in the 1890s he became Whistler...