Word: civilization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...grasp the evil of Hitler because he thought no man beyond redemption. He deeply offended Jews when he counseled them to follow the path of nonviolence. Gandhi did not want Britain's defeat, but recognized a political opportunity. In late 1940 he agreed to a modest campaign of individual civil disobedience he intended to be largely symbolic...
Fortunately for him, America during the post-Civil War boom of the 1870s was famished for faster and more reliable ways of doing business. An improvement Edison made in the stock ticker eventually earned him $40,000, a considerable sum at the time. He used this windfall to set up and staff a shop in Newark, N.J., to manufacture these tickers. But other companies began besieging Edison for technical advice, and in 1876 he moved his operation to Menlo Park and created the world's first industrial-research facility, a humming workplace dedicated to improving or creating new products...
...King, right, brought in James Lawson, a student of Gandhi's, to train protesters in nonviolence. But the most dramatic act of quiet defiance belonged to Rosa Parks, below, being fingerprinted in 1955. Her refusal to give up a seat in a Montgomery, Ala., bus galvanized the civil rights movement and boosted King's leadership...
...famously cantankerous playwright, below left, inspired ACT-UP's famously confrontational protests for an AIDS cure in the late '80s. As a result, gay and lesbian civil rights are loud parts of public debate...
...imagining--and proving--a rational universe, he in effect redesigned the human mind. Newton gave it not only intellectual tools undreamed of before, but with them, unprecedented self-confidence and ambition. If Shakespeare incomparably enlarged humanity's conception of itself, Newton--working later, in the turmoil of the English civil war and Restoration--set in place those cooler universals that were the premise of the 18th century's Age of Reason and the dynamic of the 19th century's age of revolutions--industrial, political and social...