Word: 1920s
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...what had happened. Before dawn on Sept. 29, the day of the feast of St. Michael, patron of the police, Italian authorities had conducted one of the biggest crack downs on the Mafia since Dictator Benito Mussolini's relentless suppression of that fabled criminal organization in the 1920s. Armed with copies of the warrant for the arrest of 366 Mafia members, 140 of whom were already in jail, police rounded up 53. By the time the sun rose, the jails that had been set aside for the operation were overflowing. Before the morning was well advanced, a chartered Alitalia...
Buscetta showed, though, that these two Mafias need each other. The traditional U.S. families began with the immigrant "mustache Petes." They were succeeded by the gangsters of the 1920s and '30s, who were quick to settle their differences with violence. These founding godfathers eventually gave way to more sophisticated criminals, who discovered that buying politicians and law-enforcement officials was just as easy as, and more effective than, shooting them. But the modern U.S. Mafia has fallen on hard times, say federal authorities. With their sons and heirs becoming assimilated and choosing the boardroom over the back room...
...late as the 1920s that "Discernment and the cultivation of taste, plus the scholarship of art, became the subject of proper study for gentlemen and women," writes Mayman in a recent issue of The Radcliffe Quarterly. "Making paintings was another matter...
Before the 1920s, according to Mayman, even the study of art was considered an effeminate and unworthy undertaking. Harvard's first professor of Music--and the first in the country--was John Knowles Paine, tenured in 1875. Art historian Charles Eliot Norton was tenured in 1874. Playwright George Pierce Baker, Class of 1887, taught as a Professor of English and later of Dramatic Literature from 1905 to 1924. Both were firsts in their field at Harvard...
...years long, periods of great social combustion alternating with quiescence, change followed by consolidation. After the War of 1812 and its embargoes, the frontier opened up, the economy took off, American fractiousness subsided, and the extraordinary era of good feelings commenced, lasting for more than a decade. The 1920s coincided with a less constructive but perhaps giddier national mood that found expression in the election of two laissez-faire Presidents. On the eve of the 1920 election, H.L. Mencken came out in favor of Warren Harding, "an honest reactionary" who pledged a return to normalcy. Harding's successor, Calvin...