Word: ferdinand
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...contributed to the fall of ancient Greece. Europeans of medieval times were tormented by the insect Chaucer knew as the midge; the English word mosquito, from the Spanish for "little fly," appeared in the 16th century, along with new and nastier New World species. In the 1880s the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from the triumph of building the Suez Canal, was utterly vanquished in his heroic effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, partly because thousands of the Europeans he brought with him fell victim to mosquito-borne disease...
...various times since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the language that remains the focus of Catalunya's enthusiasm for cultural distinction...
...conquering power became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492, when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique in Europe, you must begin with the fact that no other European country was so permeated -- in language, customs and cultural forms -- by Islam...
...work his way or not at all. Hence the peculiar fact, a connoisseur's bad dream, that the very parts of Rembrandt's work that seem most uniquely his -- the "unconscious" hookings and flourishes of line in some of the drawings, for instance -- were just what apprentices like Ferdinand Bol were best at imitating. The more gifted ones would work on parts of Rembrandt's pictures. Some of the assistants were brilliant painters, like Aert de Gelder or Samuel van Hoogstraten. Others, like Nicolaes Maes, Willem Drost or the feeble Isack Jouderville, would hardly be remembered but for the fact...
...earliest, least familiar years of the century yield up the most piquant material. Billy Wilder recalls learning of the outbreak of World War I when his father ordered the afternoon entertainment in an East European coffee house to stop: "There will be no more music today. The Archduke Ferdinand has been just assassinated in Sarajevo." Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop describes getting a glimpse of Charles Lindbergh as he paraded up New York City's Fifth Avenue. The closer the series gets to present day, however, the more it overlaps with a hoard of other TV nostalgia fests...