Word: conquests
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...vote, thus making a difference. "Hope is the thing with feathers," as Emily Dickinson put it, and if Obama can make it fly, it can have deep implications in a society primed to follow the passions of youth. As cultural critic Thomas Frank explained in his book The Conquest of Cool, advertising agencies in the 1960s forever transformed youth from a demographic group to a consuming ideal. Historian T.J. Jackson Lears of Rutgers University traces the association of youth with political renewal far into America's past. "It's quite thoroughly embedded," he says. "It really begins with Theodore Roosevelt...
...strange mix of confidence and modesty. A beekeeper from New Zealand, Sir Edmund Hillary was an aggressive amateur mountaineer drawn, he said, by the appeal of "grinding [competitors] into the ground on a big hill." Yet after accomplishing one of the 20th century's defining feats?his conquest, with Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953?he channeled the attention and knighthood that followed toward aiding the Nepalese Sherpas, who had so often helped him. Raising funds through his Himalayan Trust, a project he continued until his death, Hillary (far right, with Tenzing) helped install pipes...
...piece of self-promotion. Likewise, Burrow makes a welcome exception for a memoir by Bernal Díaz, a humble foot soldier who arrived in Mexico with Cortés in 1519 and took part in toppling the Aztecs. Díaz looks back on those days in The Conquest of New Spain, a first-person account written as an old man living on a modest farm in Guatemala...
...Afghanistan. Located on the trade routes between East and West, the country has always been at a crossroads of civilizations. The Silk Road provided a vector for Buddhism to come from the east, while Hellenistic and even Egyptian influences flowed the other way. Alexander the Great's eastward conquest essentially ended there in the 4th century B.C., and Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through in the 7th century A.D. on his quest for Buddhist texts. "Amsterdam, Berlin and London today are the Afghanistan of 2,000 years ago," says Khalid Siddiqi, a former Afghan refugee who is on the advisory committee...
...just as Afghanistan's geography invited cultural influence, so too did it draw a sequence of invasion and conquest that has put the country's heritage in constant peril. The Taliban's destruction of art was the culmination of years of catastrophe visited on the National Museum, and the extraordinary story of how the surviving art got here is as much part of the exhibit as the art itself...