Word: williamsburg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Colonial Williamsburg is the amateur history buff's paradise...
...Williamsburg--the Virginia colony's capital between 1699 and the Revolutionary War--was restored and reconstructed in the 1930s as a living museum of the 18th century--complete with actors in colonial garb, horse-drawn carriages and taverns serving such early American delicacies as rabbit stew...
...newly minted products were routinely labeled STRICTLY AMERICAN. Collecting Americana -- "antiqueering," as it was known -- become a national hobby. Henry Ford filled warehouses with what he called "American stuff": Duncan Phyfe tables, endless volumes of McGuffey Readers and Thomas Edison memorabilia. John D. Rockefeller Jr. set about restoring colonial Williamsburg, Va., in the painstaking detail that only a billionaire could afford. In the '30s the New Deal was sponsoring research into folk art and folk songs. For the first time the government, not the private sector, became the main custodian of history...
...Virginia, he first enrolled in pre-medicine, then gravitated toward history. "I started with American history," Gates says, "and moved east." He studied Western Europe as an undergrad, Eastern Europe for his master's degree and Russian history and language for his doctorate. Gates worked part time in Williamsburg as a school-bus driver with the eccentric habit of teaching his riders words and phrases in German and Russian. At Indiana University, he worked as a dorm counselor, as did his wife-to-be Becky, whom he met when they chaperoned a hayride...
...development organization in Cambridge, Mass. Accion has loaned $75 million to workers in Central and South America and created 100,000 permanent jobs. When Accion decided to widen its mission to fight poverty in the U.S., it dispatched Delma Soto-Larsen to start a self-employment project in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. She has an M.B.A. and has worked for Citibank and Chemical Bank, but her real education began when Accion sent her to Colombia to unlearn all that she had been taught. "You're doing everything that all the books tell you not to do," she says...