Word: spreads
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most brilliant stroke, national defiance of the law forbidding Indians to make their own salt. With 78 followers, he set out for the coast to make salt until the law was repealed. By the time he reached the sea, people all across the land had joined in. Civil disobedience spread until Gandhi was arrested again. Soon more than 60,000 Indians filled the jails, and Britain was shamed by the gentle power of the old man and his unresisting supporters. Though Gandhi had been elected to no office and represented no government, the Viceroy soon began negotiating with...
...distant cities became linked through commerce (much of it orchestrated by written contract), culture acquired a kind of disaster insurance. Any valuable meme--the concept of the chariot or of coins--would spread so fast from city to city that it could survive any catastrophes that afflicted its birthplace. The world's data-processing system was getting better at making backup copies...
That's why so much Roman culture survived the disintegration of the Western Empire. The most prolific memes had long since spread to Byzantium if not beyond, and would keep replicating themselves even as Western Europe struggled to regroup. Thus the astrolabe would eventually be reintroduced to the area via Islamic culture, which thrived during the early Middle Ages. Meanwhile, in Asia, key memes would arise--the spinning wheel, even printing--and some would migrate all the way to Europe...
...enlarged what would become the millennium's most durable empire; the Italian navigator who sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Joan of Arc, Sultan Mehmet II and Christopher Columbus indisputably made lasting history. But it was one of their 15th century contemporaries who created a revolutionary way to spread not only their names and deeds but the sum total of human knowledge around the globe...
...equipment to his creditor Fust, who carried on the work, alone at first and later with the assistance of his son-in-law Peter Schoffer. The monopoly they may have had on Gutenberg's methods did not last long. Presses adapted to print from movable type rapidly spread across Europe. By 1500 an estimated 30,000 titles had been published...