Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After that ego-deflating lunch, the tumult of the convention was a relief. As Madison took his front-row seat with the Virginia delegation, a page handed him a hastily scrawled note from Roger Sherman of Connecticut: "We need to talk." This could be the break in the deadlock that Madison was hoping for; Sherman was the last of the old-time New England bosses. But getting through the clogged aisles to the Connecticut delegation on the other side of Independence Hall was a nightmare. A live-TV crew dogged Madison's every step as Reporter Don Samuelson shouted questions...
...rate of two to four a week. Hamilton, who hatched the idea, dashed off "Federalist No. 1" in October 1787 aboard a sloop on the Hudson and cranked out the 85th and last in May 1788, after Jay had fallen too sick to write and Madison had decamped for Virginia to fight the ratifying battle there. "Whilst the printer was putting into type parts of a number," Madison recalled, "the following parts were under...
...breathe? A lot thinner than we probably think. Because the relics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are preserved in museums, we fall into the habit of thinking of the past as a museum, dense with artifacts, Chippendale and Copley everywhere, a colonial Williamsburg stretching from tidewater Virginia to the Long Wharf in Boston. Of course, neither life nor art was like that. To understand the culture of early republican America, one has to begin with a tiny society scattered along the eastern side of a continent no European had yet crossed, consisting of fewer than 4 million...
...excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made at elegance" and that it was difficult to find a workman who could draw a column correctly. "The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land," he wrote. "The first principles...
...Maison Carree was decisive for American architecture as a whole. By copying it, Jefferson felt, one could improve the Republic's general taste, "introducing into the State an example of architecture, in the classic style of antiquity." He used it (working from drawings) as the basis of the new Virginia state capitol in Richmond (1785-92). He visited Nimes in 1787 and contemplated its walls and portico, "gazing whole hours . . . like a lover at his mistress...