Word: frontierisms
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...strong, silent stereotype of the Western gunfighter has been shot full of holes by a hard-eyed generation of frontier historians. To hear the debunkers tell it, the fastest guns in the West were for the most part dirty, drunken, vicious, stupid, syphilitic delinquents who seldom drew anything more dangerous than a one-eyed jack, and hardly had the cojones to face a tranquilized prairie dog in a fair fight...
Given the violence of the age, says Rosa, the "gunfighter" was largely created through the mechanical ingenuity of one man: Samuel Colt. By 1861, there were nine main varieties of Colt revolvers (mostly known as "Peacemakers" or "hog-legs") in use on the frontier. They constituted the most dramatic revolution in sheer firepower since the invention of the musket. Colt revolvers were fast and reliable. In superior hands they could regularly hit a five-inch circle at 50 yards. At 100 yards, the Peacemaker could drive a bullet more than three inches into a pine plank. With such a weapon...
Early in the summer, a few forest fires had been contained on the outskirts of Fairbanks--an overgrown frontier town that is the closest thing to civilization in Alaska's 400,000 square-mile interior. Throughout August, the distant fires still created a persistent haze and a strong smell of pine incense. At any moment, lightning could ignite the dry moss in a forest much closer to home and destroy some section of the town, but the pool of trained firefighters was nearly exhausted. Besides local volunteers, firefighters from Montana, Idaho, and other Western states and laborers from the local...
...intelligence to do so. That formulation of the intellectual's responsibility has an unassailable simplicity, but the role acquires deep moral complexity when intellectuals join big organizations such as government. The very political activism that so cheered intellectuals in the first days of the New Frontier is now widely regarded as corruption and betrayal. Under John Kennedy and on into the Johnson Administration, the intellectual seemed ubiquitous -moving back and forth among the universities, government, business and industry. Harvard's Edwin O. Reischauer and John Kenneth Galbraith were dispatched as ambassadors to Japan and India. "Pragmatic" intellectuals like...
...surprising conclusion, considering the picture that Ethel presented while her husband was alive. In the giddy days of the New Frontier and after, she was known as the prankish clown of the clan, the exuberant athlete ready for any gambol, the nonstop, miniskirted supermom who exemplified all the headlong, slightly manic "vigah" of the Kennedys. Ethel was the hostess who presided gleefully when Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was pushed, fully clad, into the swimming pool at a Hickory Hill party. She was the mistress of a wacky ménage that included even more animals than children?Brumus, the huge Newfoundland...