Word: americans
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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WALT WHITMAN was an American genius. He brought originality to an imitative literature, cutting and hewing poems out of the city streets and country ponds of a vast America. "The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem," he said in the 1855 preface to his masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed...
...still the light of the world, it refreshes and reassures to discover a man who did beleive in the President as a redeemer, and democracy as a catalyst for love. A child of expansion and of manifest destiny, Walt Whitman embodied a sprit that no longer pervades the American consciousness. Kaplan revives Whitman and his dreams, revealing democratic vistas that have become blurred in our own time...
...American economy was sent reeling when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] hiked the price of crude oil to over $20 per barrel--the second major increase in less than a decade. The dollar plummeted on the exchange market; inflation spiralled upwards. The evening news carried stories of record setting gas lines as motorists jockeyed for position to purchase gasoline at over $1 a gallon. And, as the winter approached, homeowners watched anxiously as the average price of home heating oil rose from 53.7 cents to 90.8 cents in January of 1980, an increase of about 170 per cent...
...Michael J. Halberstam '53 last week sent shock waves through the United States and the rest of the world. Their deaths received attention because of their prominent positions in the worlds of music and medicine, but the shootings were only two of thousands that take the lives of American men and women each year. These sordid statistics underscore the need to outlaw the manufacture and use of handguns in this country...
...have no fears that Kissinger will be soft on communism or try to redistribute the world's wealth. But however unlikely, even the possibility of Kissinger's political resurrection is horrifying. No man in this country ever deserved more to be tried as a war criminal; no American ever deserved less another chance to kill and destroy...