Word: underground
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...Relying on the oral history of one family, without corroboration from other sources. is what offends historians like Giles Wright, an Underground Railroad expert who works for the New Jersey Historical Commission. "The Underground Railroad is so rife with distortions and misinformation, and this is just one more instance when someone comes across folklore and assumes it's true," he says...
...trying to set the record straight every chance they get. They present papers for publication and at conferences. They fill pages and pages of websites debunking what they believe to be a myth akin to George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. They engage in heated debates on Underground Railroad and quilt studies e-mail lists. And a few months ago Barbara Brackman, a renowned quilt historian, even published her own book called Facts and Fabrications; Unraveling the History of Quilts and Slavery (C&T Publishing) to present what she considers to be an accurate assessment of slavery, quilts...
...numbers are equally grim around impoverished Latin America, where the United Nations estimates more than 4 million clandestine abortions are performed each year, resulting in more than 5,000 women's deaths. Underground abortions are one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in Chile. Although Chile has one of South America's strictest anti-abortion codes, it's estimated to have twice as many abortions each year (200,000) as Canada - a country with twice Chile's population. (Abortion is legal in Canada.) As a result, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, late last year sanctioned the free distribution...
...side tunnel was shielded with white steel plates and girders, which led into a small steel-walled chamber. The room, which was bare apart from two empty five-gallon water containers, must have been at least 100 feet underground, and could probably have withstood a direct hit by a heavy bomb. A power cable along the walls linked several bare bulbs, while a black plastic bag hanging from a hook contained the remnants of what last summer could have been fresh oranges or apples...