Word: year
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This] was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression 'tough guy,' was the man of [the year...
...After a seven-year insurgency, this rebel defeated the ruling regime and took charge of a government that remains in power here 40 years later...
...next 33 years, he led three major crusades to undermine the power and moral defenses of the British Raj. In 1919-22 he mustered widespread nonviolent strikes, then a campaign of peaceful noncooperation, urging Indians to boycott anything British--schools, courts, goods, even the English language. He believed mass noncooperation would achieve independence within a year. Instead, it degenerated into bloody rioting, and British soldiers turned their guns on a crowd in Amritsar, massacring 400. Gandhi called his underestimating of the violence inside Indian society his "Himalayan blunder." Still, villagers mobbed him wherever he went, calling him Mahatma...
...World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic...
...Normandy, born around 1027, was the child of chaos. The illegitimate son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, he was known for most of his life as William the Bastard. Robert eventually recognized him, but only as he departed on a fatal pilgrimage to the Holy Land, leaving his seven-year-old a target for usurping barons. One by one, William's guardians and advisers were cut down. The boy escaped assassination only by a desperate flight to his mother's estate...