Word: 19th
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even more surprising is that Robert Downey Jr. doesn't manage to overcome all that. In theory, he seems like such a good casting choice for a new Holmes; no actor of the appropriate age working today seems more quick-witted or verbally agile. Holmes was a late-19th-century bad boy, known for dipping into the cocaine here and there, and Downey Jr., reformed though he may be, is still our favorite bad boy. To imagine him in a different Sherlock Holmes movie, one darker, smarter and less desperate to entertain, invigorated by a less standard-issue plot...
...Obamas have attended Sunday services in Washington three times this year - once at the predominantly African-American 19th Street Baptist Church, and twice at St. John's Episcopal Church across Lafayette Square from the White House. Asked at Tuesday's White House briefing whether the First Family is still searching for a local church to join, press secretary Robert Gibbs responded: "The President has attended fairly regularly up at Camp David a church that he's comfortable in and has enjoyed attending." (See pictures of Obama meeting Pope Benedict...
Christmas carols today carry cozy connotations of ancient traditions as old as King Wenceslas, but Christmas caroling as we know it dates back to the 19th Century and not much further. In fact, caroling itself didn't always involve Christmas, and the ancient tradition of traveling from house to house to wish neighbors good cheer didn't always involve singing. There's a distinction to be made between carols - songs stemming from medieval musical traditions - and today's Christmas caroling, says Daniel Abraham, musicology expert and choral director at American University in Washington, D.C. "The concept of carol...
...merged in Victorian England, as church carols began to merge with Christian folk music. At that time, it was far from a Christmas tradition; festivals like May Day were deemed worthy of caroling, too, but the repertoire as well as early records of this are pretty unclear. In the 19th Century, as Christmas became more commercialized and popular, publishers began churning out anthologies of carols, many which were ancient hymns, also circulating them in broadsheets...
...Despite its dubious beginnings, fad dieting gained mass appeal in the 19th century. In 1829, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham touted the Graham diet - centered on caffeine-free drinks and vegetarian cuisine and supplemented by the eponymous graham cracker - as a cure for not just obesity but masturbation (and the subsequent blindness it was thought to cause). The diet became so popular that the students of Oberlin College were forced onto it for a brief period in the 1830s before they successfully rebelled through mass dissent in 1841. Thirty-five years later, an English casketmaker named William Banting became famous...