Word: background
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This is the background of a very ordinary melodrama in which one racketeer shoots another and the blame is almost fixed on a thug who wants to get married and reform. There is a conventionally kind-hearted police officer; a mother (the arcade proprietress) who will do anything to save her wayward son; and a harsh, wisecracking ingenue of the half-world. Deprived of Cleon Throckmorton's literal setting (arcade equipment supplied by B. Madorsky of Brooklyn), the play would provide nothing of unusual interest...
Against this tense background the Senate and the President enacted another unseemly wrangle. The issue between them was the threat, real or imaginary, of increased expenditures Congress might or might not authorize. Universal is the practice among Congressmen and Senators to introduce, chiefly to impress their constituents, measures authorizing huge expenditures which they know will never be passed, will never cost the U. S. a cent. As political gestures, some 10,400 bills have been so far offered in the House of which only a bare hundred or two will ever become...
...placed Mozart's D Major Symphony. Wagner's Tannhauser overture and the skirling Bacchanale music, Borodin's Prince Igor dances. Because these things had greater substance, Toscanini attained with them effects which, ironically, set the worthy efforts of the guest of honor sadly in the background...
...personal reward and his firm interpretation of the National Constitution. Rhetoric beats a shallow drum before the figure of a man whose effort was not stinted with egoism, whose diseeraing eyes were not slow to kindle with humanity. As a man who played many integral parts against the shifting background of national affairs his death destroys a vital link between past and present...
...second and less apparent purpose of the university can be summed up in the trite phrase "to keep alive the light of learning." Those who are to turn out that indefinite product--the educated man--must have more for their background than four or even six years of classroom education, will provide. To codify and present knowledge in comprehensible form is their profession; they have dedicated themselves to the work of revealing to other men the treasures of the ages. But their duty does not end there; they must not stagnate in the mere conning over of long-known facts...