Word: mid-19th
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...year-old phrase still keeps its haunting simplicity. For generations, America meant the part of the earth that was not corrupt, not worn by labor, tainted by inequality or poisoned by greed. This myth of paradise-on-the-frontier pervaded 18th century ideas about America and, by the mid-19th, had become one of the chief regulating ideas of America's discourse about itself: "That unfallen, western world," as Melville wrote in Moby Dick, "which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic...
...sense of the cubist moment can never come again. It is almost as distant, in its dulcet and inexhaustible optimism, as the faith that built Beauvais. Cubism was the climax of an urban culture that had been assembling itself in Paris since the mid-19th century, a culture renewed by rapid transitions and shifting modes. It was art's first response to the torrent of signs unleashed by a new technology. Not for nothing did Picasso inscribe "Our future is in the air" on several of his cubist still lifes; tellingly, Picasso's nickname for Braque was "Wilbur," after Wilbur...
...precisely defined the ingredients necessary for a society to generate innovation. Historian Barbara Tuchman notes that the 12th and 13th centuries enjoyed "one of civilization's great bursts of development," with the introduction of the compass, the spinning wheel and the windmill. Mid-19th century Europe and the U.S. enjoyed similar explosions. But why? Perhaps necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and the demands of the current energy and environmental crises may yet revive the spirit of the Yankee tinkerer...
...figure in the libraries and the art of library science, Bryant has transformed this philosophy into actions. He has sat on myriads of library, book and academic commissions. For ten years, for example, Bryant chaired the National Committee on the Preservation of Books. "Practically any book printed since the mid-19th century is on paper which is deteriorating at some rate," he sighs. "The libraries of this country face the enormous problem of preserving man's intellectual memory." Bryant is not used to dealing with problems on a small scale. He designed, engineered and oversaw the massive switch...
...funds were drained in the mid-19th century by defaults among borrowers who took the money and ran (illustrating another Franklin maxim: "Opportunity is the great bawd"). Today the trusts hold less than $4 million: $3.2 million in Boston (now loaned to medical students at 2%), and $770,000 in Philadelphia (currently invested in mortgages). Boston Trustee Noel Morss figures that his city's sum will grow only to $5 million by 1991, when it is to be divided between Boston and the state of Massachusetts under the terms of Franklin's will. The suggestion has been made...