Word: railroads
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When Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard explored in their book Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (Random House) a family legend that said messages encoded in quilts helped slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad, they had no idea that their hypothesis would inspire rancor from scholars who declared it false. They also couldn't have predicted how their story, published less than 10 years ago, would capture the popular imagination - being treated as fact on The Oprah Winfrey Show, in museum exhibits, in children's textbooks...
...They had a lot in common, these two brash kids who, early in life, felt unappreciated for the special talent they knew they had. Betty's railroad brakeman father left their Battle Creek, Mich., home when she was two, and killed himself 14 years later, leaving $100 each to Betty and her elder sister Marion. "Betty was jealous of her sister right from the start," Mrs. Thornburg told TIME in 1950. "She was always in my lap, always after affection. She would stand on her head, do cartwheels, yell or do anything to attract attention away from her quieter sister...
...been writing all afternoon about "the useful tyranny of clock time," and here it was, displayed two dozen different ways in a shop window on his own block. Today he had scribbled out his theory that because watches in every pocket and clocks in every factory and railroad station had stimulated in people an acute awareness of time passing, that itchy new awareness had in turn stimulated the popular impatience with the status quo, and the new demands for still speedier progress...
Travel too was also incredibly faster. The first primitive railroads started here and there in the 1830s, but during the '40s, "railroad mania" had kicked in--four times as much track was laid in 1848 as the year before. Everyone spoke of the resulting "annihilation of time and space," and in a journal called the Quarterly Review a writer predicted that "as distances [are] thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense city...
...looking for opportunity in the post-Civil Rights era. He found it at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he received his degree in 1975, and in Minnesota, where he earned his master’s at Mankato State and went to work for the Burlington Railroad...