Word: mid-19th
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...stunning book Ship Fever, a collection of moody historical meditations cast as short stories, the author of this powerful, brooding novel sets up camp in the mid-19th century and forages for the bones of fiction. She picks an obsession--the search in the high Arctic for a northwest passage to the Pacific--that now seems bizarre. Ships were crushed. Men died of scurvy, watched by healthy Inuit tribesmen who were scorned as beasts. Ill-fated expeditions followed, intent on rescue, science or glory. One of these is Barrett's stage, on which two sharply opposed men, a bookish naturalist...
Huckleberry Finn, if grimly read, might be a caseworker's report on family dysfunction, child abuse, alcoholism, clan violence, stupidity, hypocrisy and institutionalized racial oppression--a sweet classic, maybe, but also a fairly accurate picture of life along the Mississippi in the mid-19th century...
...notion that disease originates in cells rather than tissues or organs, introduced in the mid-19th century by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, brought on just such a radical change in perspective. So too did the germ theory, based on British surgeon Joseph Lister's application of Louis Pasteur's work to prevent wound infections. Each was the result of thousands of meticulous observations made over many years. Virchow's studies were done in a university setting; Lister's in a laboratory that he and his wife set up in the kitchen of their home, where they worked tirelessly until...
...coast and tangled woods were--in the expressive phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant landscape painting or religious art during the 17th or 18th century, by the mid-19th century, landscape was the national religious symbol...
...mid-19th century, however, heaven had hit a sort of ornamented bankruptcy. The stark vision of the Puritans had given way to what would later be called the Victorian heaven. Here was the humanistic heaven with a vengeance, calmly convinced of its own literal truth but with a spiritual core seemingly provided by House & Garden. Its strongest proponents were not clergy but a new breed of popular novelists like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose 1868 The Gates Ajar, set in heaven, was a runaway best seller through the end of the century. Wrote Phelps of one celestial interlude: "We stopped before...