Word: soils
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THIRTY years ago this week, on the morning of Sept. 1, 1939, Nazi bombers swooped down on the airfield and cities of Poland. A few days later, Adolf Hitler reviewed his all-conquering troops on Polish soil (above). The unprovoked attack touched off history's most widespread and cataclysmic conflict. Before World War II ended nearly six years later, it had involved 60 countries and claimed more than 50 million lives. This week, as wailing sirens in Warsaw and ceremonies across Poland marked the 30th anniversary of the German invasion, the Poles reminded the world that the first victims...
...Vladimir Ashkenazy, 32, one of the world's great pianists, as an example of a Soviet artist who travels happily in and out of his homeland. "A travesty of truth," replied Ashkenazy from Greece, where he was vacationing. Indeed, the pianist has not set foot on Russian soil since 1963, when he fled Moscow in fear and disgust. Ashkenazy explained that he had been forbidden to travel for three years after his U.S. tour in 1958, and was later granted an exit visa only on condition that his wife remained in Russia as a "moral hostage." Eventually, Khrushchev gave...
Mexico City sits upon a reclaimed lake, and for centuries it has slowly been sinking into the spongy soil. Buildings along the same block often settle at differing speeds, and streets also sink at random. The famed Palacio de Bellas Artes, where American tourists fight for tickets to the Ballet Folklorico, has dropped nine feet since it was completed in 1934. Considering its flimsy underpinnings, Mexico City is a particularly treacherous locale in which to construct a subway...
That shape, and the ingenious engineering that made the project feasible, is the handiwork of Mexico's largest builder, Bernardo Quintana. His box tunnel literally floats like a ship on subsoil that is 80% water. The trick was to remove precisely the right weight of soil and water without undermining buildings alongside the right of way. To do so, Quintana first built sidewalls for a trench, then removed the muck between them through a complex electroosmosis process of his own devising. The roof to form a tunnel came last. By the time the whole subway is completed in November...
...poeticism and evocative drama. The popular portrayal of this period also habitually refers to it as the death-knell of the symphony; in which traditional forms were dealt a stunning blow and collapsed from sheer exhaustion after the breathless and reckless creation of munificent musical cathedrals on the consumptive soil of weary nineteenth-century harmony. The post-romantic decades are viewed as the beginning of a still-unresolved crisis in which succeeding musicians have become crippled with a morbid obsession of emancipation from the past, resulting in the aberrations of serialism and the avant-garde. While it is undeniable that...