Word: 1920s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...kind of newspaper assignment Gene Fowler relished in the 1920s was to be told by his managing editor to find a deserving old gentleman for a monkey-gland rejuvenation operation. When a scholarly greybeard named Mr. Bacon came into the New York American's offices primed with schemes of calendar reform and admitted, conversationally, to two carnal thoughts a year "at the most," Fowler knew he had his man. He went to a pet shop and procured "a nasty-tempered fugitive from an organ-grinder's beat," though in his columns Fowler called the monkey "Ponce de Leon...
German Composer Friedrich von Flotow (1812-83) wrote about a score of operas for the theaters of Paris, but only Martha remained in the repertory. As late as the 1920s it was a smash at the Met, with Caruso periodically igniting the house with the tenor aria "M'appari." The only other scrap of the opera likely to be familiar to modern audiences is The Last Rose of Summer, which Flotow lifted from a book of Irish folk songs, where it was known as The Groves of Blarney. When Berlioz heard Soprano Adelina Patti sing the air, he remarked...
...haute couture in Paris last week, buyers and fashion editors from all over the world got their first look at the color and shape of the spring lines-and found themselves looking backward. The new look was the old look of the F. Scott Fitzgerald flapper in the 1920s. Skirts and coats were straight, short, with hemlines flaring. Shoes were square-toed. Bosoms were flat, backs bent and billowing, with designs that required the mannequins not only to slouch but virtually assume the posture of an expectant, concave catcher's mitt. Though Paris fashions have been irresolutely marching backward...
...Moving Mondrian. Having been brought up in the shadow of two traditional sculptors, the third Calder was a bit bored with the idea of becoming one himself. He started out to be an engineer. In the 1920s he began making statues (Josephine Baker, Helen Wills) in wire, produced a series of wire goldfish bowls in which the fish swam rhythmically back and forth at the turn of a crank. Out of his contact with Mondrian, he wanted to do "a Mondrian that moves." Thus the mobile...
Rocky Road. The road toward federation has been long and rocky. As early as the 1920s Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, suggested federation of East Africa. But fearing domination by Kenya's white settlers (whose stubborn opposition to the winds of change was later to provoke the Mau Mau), black nationalists said no. Their opposition deepened when Britain federated the neighboring Rhodesias and Nyasaland in 1953 in a forced union which the blacks said served only the interests of Southern Rhodesia's white settlers. Last year Nyerere became the first East African to espouse publicly the inescapable logic...