Word: harshness
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Recently a school of social historians have focused scholarly attentions more closely on the period. In doing so, they have begun to reveal a time of harsh penal codes that permitted judges to flaunt the death penalty, a dearth of law enforcement, incipient industrial revolution, violent town-wide football matches, bear baiting, turnpike rioting, abject urban poverty, burgeoning trade, and busting shops...
...anger, Freedom Rising is also infused with a deep love for the South African land and people, and ultimately with great hope. And the harsh bite of Swanson's all too evident distaste for apartheid is countered by a poignant vision of what could be. In one highly moving passage, Swanson recounts his visit with Nokukanya Luthuli, widow of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Chief Luthuli, who was banned for speaking out against apartheid. Luthuli, together with the other 25,000 Black residents of the region, had just staved off a government attempt to force them into a bantustan. Swanson found...
...these terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombing in the spring...
Albania, an isolated, mountainous country of 2.9 million people, is a place of bleak statistics. It is Europe's poorest nation, and one of the world's most closed societies. Its harsh internal policies place it among the last bastions of Stalinism. This is the legacy of Enver Hoxha (pronounced Hod-ja), Albania's leader since 1944, who died last week from heart disease at 76. For more than 40 years Hoxha kept his tiny country on what he considered the only true path to Communism: self-reliance, total party control and a suspicion of outsiders that...
...second source of unrest was the harsh new economic measures promised by the government of General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, including tax increases ranging from 15% to 50% on imported goods and new tariffs on most domestic products. When protests broke out in Guatemala City, the capital, Mejia Victores, who came to power in a 1983 coup, suspended the new taxes and called off the trip he had planned to take to the Vatican and the Middle East...