Word: timbuktu
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...already extinct. Causes of this high mortality rate: the phonograph and the radio. Primitive races find old-fashioned radio sets somewhat fragile for jungle use. But cheap, hand-cranked squeak-boxes with chipped records of American cowboy songs and Italian operas are found today in mud-walled villages from Timbuktu to Singapore. Impressed by this mechanical magic, natives imitate the scratchy voices, learn to sing Il Trovatore, and end by preferring it, for better or worse, to their own ancient chants...
...aunt of Ambassador to France Jesse Isidor Straus. No tyro at roughing it, robust Mrs. Straus equipped and led an expedition to Nyasaland and British East Africa in 1929, spent last winter poking about Mayan ruins in Yucatan. With the Field Museum's experts she will trek to Timbuktu and Lake Chad, return to the U. S. after two months when the party reaches Lagos. South Nigeria. Her maid will accompany...
...French reporters she babbled, "America is a fairyland! Its women are beautiful! Its character is best interpreted by its man-built wonders, les skyscrapers! I certainly hope to return. It is possible, however, that I shall accept an invitation to join a French expedition which is going to Timbuktu, crossing the Sahara desert in caterpillar automobiles...
...furlough from the École Polytechnique to fight in the defense of Paris, unsuccessfully. With soldiering in his blood, he went to the Far East, assisted at the French occupation of Formosa in 1885. Eight years later he performed the feat described in his book My March on Timbuktu. Starting down the left bank of the River Niger on Dec. 27. 1893, he marched and skirmished 813 kilometres (504 mi.) in 48 days, entered on Feb. 12, 1894 "The Town of Timbuktu, the Meeting Place of Camel and Canoe,"† Steady promotion carried Joseph Joffre by 1911 to the post...
...Bagola has had a hard, queer time. A black man but a Jew, he is a native of the Ondo bush, hinterland of Dahomey, in western Africa. His people, according to legend, left Palestine after Roman Titus' sack of Jerusalem (A. D. 70), fled to Morocco, to Timbuktu and farther. There, swallowed up by African natives, they still remained a Jewish sect, continued Jewish rites. Says LoBagola: they carry out the ceremony of circumcision to the letter, "although not in the same way as in Palestine today. Our rabbis permit us to use only our teeth and fingernails...