Word: ancestors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Puppeteer Bil Baird's book is not a history but an appreciation of the theatrical form whose genesis, lost in time, goes back thousands of years. Punch and Judy were born before Diarist Samuel Pepys, who watched their antics in the 17th century. Punch's ancestor, a hook-nosed Turkish bully named Karaghioz, preceded him by several centuries. The special exaggerated magic of the marionette, which lives only in the minds of its spectators and often requires three human puppeteers to give it movement, is affectionately evoked by a man who has been quickening his own mannequins...
...apparatus now known as the Central Intelligence Agency had a Revolutionary War ancestor called the Culper Ring. America's first espionage agents-a whaler, a tavern keeper, a Quaker merchant, Schoolmaster Nathan Hale-were very ingenuous spies. The members referred to each other by numbers, wrote their messages to General Washington in disappearing ink called Sympathetic Stain, and were totally hangdog about their calling. "I've lived four years of my life in fear," one of them is supposed to have said, "and I'll live the rest of it in shame." Author Corey Ford...
...doorway of a barn, sharpens his tools on a grindstone. It doubled as a weather vane, churning and sharpening away furiously when the wind rose before a storm. What its anonymous carpenter did not know was that in time he would be looked upon as the artistic ancestor of much more sophisticated turnings in the wind-contemporary mobiles...
...been suggested that Harvard's Commencement, the ancestor of all American academic ceremonies and quite distinct from those of Europe, is the United States' chief contribution to higher education. If an undergraduate cannot find distinction in the Harvard curriculum, he can be sure it will appear in the ceremony of the parting...
...German voters thought power should reside in one man at the top; today only 18% still have such authoritarian longings. West Germany's press and television are strong, free, and outspokenly critical. Hardly anyone advocates extremist solutions for anything. The army bears little resemblance to its goose-stepping ancestor. It is a citizen force, and most of its members are self-conscious in what are often derided as bus-conductor uniforms; indeed, most German bus conductors look more like soldiers than the soldiers...