Word: much
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kurd (even then a drawback in Middle Eastern politics), and he was from Syria, a Sunni state, trying to rule Egypt, a Shi'ite country. But a masterly 17-year campaign employing diplomacy, the sword and great good fortune made him lord of Egypt, Syria and much of Mesopotamia. The lands bracketed the Crusader states, and their combined might made plausible Nur al-Din's dream of a Muslim-Christian showdown...
Jefferson was a creature of the 18th century; he was the man of the 18th century. A dozen powerful strands of the Enlightenment converged in him: a certain sky-blue clarity, an aggressive awareness of the world, a fascination with science, a mechanical vision of the universe (much thanks to Isaac Newton) and an obsession with mathematical precision. The writer Garry Wills has suggested that Jefferson believed human life could be geared to the precision and simplicity of heaven's machinery. Many of the contradictions in his character arose from the discrepancies between such intellectual machinery and the passionate, organic...
...only 33. The Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia in June 1776, chose a committee of five (Benjamin Franklin, Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and Jefferson) to draft a Declaration of Independence. Jefferson nominated Adams to compose the draft. Adams demurred, "I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular. You are very much otherwise." Besides, "You can write 10 times better than I." The committee chose Jefferson...
...drawn rapidly across the embossed symbols of the Morse code produced what he later described as "a light, musical, rhythmical sound, resembling human talk heard indistinctly." If it was possible, he reasoned, to "hear" dots and dashes, might not the human voice be reproduced in a similar manner? After much trial and error, Edison gathered a small group of witnesses and recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a strange-looking contraption. The spectators were amazed to hear the machine play back Edison's high-pitched voice. The phonograph was born...
...Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature," argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler. "He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come." The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that judgments about good and evil were little more than matters of taste, reflections of social class and power and status. Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and instead explain Hitler's conduct...