Word: roots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...private ownership of weapons -- who lay the blame at the door of America's uniquely libertarian gun laws. Gun control understandably becomes a mantra for Americans seeking to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy. After all, many societies face problems of youth violence; while it doesn't address the root causes of that violence, making weapons inaccessible effectively contains the damage. "Youth violence is on the rise across Europe," says TIME Paris bureau chief Tom Sancton. "But you don't have this kind of mass killing because it's hard for even the most sociopathic teenagers to get their hands...
...Root seeking inevitably demands patience--and ingenuity. Joseph Silinonte, 42, from Brooklyn, N.Y., had scoured U.S. Census, Naturalization and Board of Election documents for the birthplace of his great-great-great-grandfather, saloon owner Charles O'Neil, to no avail. Even an 1887 obituary in the Brooklyn Eagle was no help. Then he remembered that the record of O'Neil's son's marriage in 1872 had contained a little mark indicating a dispensation of banns--forgoing the public announcement, on three successive Sundays, of intention to wed. Silinonte persuaded a diocesan official to take him to the Roman Catholic...
...Root seekers haunt cemeteries. Dennis Rawlings had almost given up searching for a set of great-grandparents in a Port Hope, Ont., graveyard when, on a hunch, he took a pen from his pocket and poked it into the ground, hitting something hard. Tearing up the sod, he found an old stone reading MARY ANN RAWLINGS--DIED 1869. "We picked up 'Grandma' and cleaned her up for the next 100 years, until somebody else comes to visit," he recalls. "It felt like an episode from The Twilight Zone...
...celebrity-obsessed culture, it is no wonder that some root seekers hope to uncover an aristocratic connection. Stokes, the former Dallas principal, thought his family might be related to Robert E. Lee, as several generations had a family member with the middle name Lee or Lea in honor of the general. It turned out that his great-great-great-grandfather had been an admirer, not a relative, of Lee's. In fact, as he went back, Stokes found his first American ancestors were indentured servants. "We came to America basically as white slaves," he says, with a laugh. Lately, Harold...
...accumulation of signs can carry architecture only so far, because architecture in its root and essence is very much more than sign language. Yesterday's ironies wrap today's garbage. Architecture has to go deeper, find real human needs and deal with those. Foster likes to list them in simple terms: the structure that holds a building up; the services that let it work; "the ecology of the building--whether it is naturally ventilated, whether you can open the windows, the quality of light"; the mass or lightness of its materials; its relationship to the site, the street...