Word: 1920s
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...Santos Cardona was sentenced to 90 days' hard labor at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 2006 for his involvement in prisoner mistreatment at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where he worked as a dog handler. Though prisoners picked cotton and repaired railroads after the Civil War, restrictions imposed in the 1920s and '30s have curtailed prison labor. These days, prisoners' jobs are more likely to consist of making license plates or doing laundry. Not exactly fulfilling gigs, but cushy enough, comparatively, that some people might be hankering for guys like Bernie Madoff to get a taste of Pyongyang justice instead...
...scientific equations of modern times. I loved it, but as I meandered through the book, I was struck by an unexpected poignancy. The first essays, by and large, described breakthroughs that had taken place in the laboratories of Europe. The second half was quite different. Some time in the 1920s, the balance of scientific discovery shifted inexorably to the U.S. A small book of essays held within it proof of a profound historical change...
...Mitter, the first half of the 20th century - that period when Shanghai was at its peak, but which is routinely dismissed in the thumbnail history - is "really important; the questions about their society that Chinese are asking now are very similar to the ones that they asked in the 1920s and 1930s." (Read "Why China Keeps Picking on Sarkozy...
...actually assign a lot of blame for our recent troubles on a lack of interest-rate caps - that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why? Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization...
Cursive started to lose its clout back in the 1920s, when educators theorized that because children learned to read by looking at books printed in manuscript rather than cursive, they should learn to write the same way. By World War II, manuscript, or print writing, was in standard use across the U.S. Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don't master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes...