Word: mid-19th
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...fugitive, escaping the consequences of his past as a radical agitator. The time and the place could not have been more propitious for a man with an extravagant taste for self-righteousness and the sort of brawn developed by swinging a ten-pound cooper's hammer. Mid-19th century Chicago was beginning America's painful, often bloody transition from frontier to urban society. Law enforcement was faltering between mere inefficiency and dedicated corruption. Into the power vacuum stepped the indefatigable, incorruptible Pinkerton, self-made gangbuster. In 1849 he became Chicago's first and only police detective. After...
Like the reigning romantic heroes of mid-19th century musical Europe, Chopin and Liszt, New Orleans-born Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69) had sex appeal aplenty. As a Wunderkind pianist-composer in the Paris salons, as a lion on tour in the U.S., the West Indies and Latin America, he dazzled the ladies with his pink-lemonade piano pieces and thrilled them with his frail, aristocratic good looks and his saturnine, bedroomy eyelids. One panting female, so the story goes, even swooped down upon him at the end of a recital, picked him up in her arms and made...
Until the mid-19th century, sexual deviation involving man, woman or beast could be punished by death. The celebrated trial of Oscar Wilde took place under an 1885 law specifically decreeing that "indecent acts between males in public or private are a criminal offense." The old Draconian laws, however, did not fetch in many offenders: fewer than 100 homosexuals have been convicted annually in Britain in recent years, and the occasional publicized case has evoked more public sympathy for the defendant than support for the prosecution. In fact, the new bill really frees homosexuals from the fear of blackmail rather...
Overreliance on confessions has troubled common-law countries ever since the rise of police forces in the mid-19th century. The drafters of the 1872 India Evidence Act put the problem succinctly: "It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing pepper into a poor devil's eyes than to go about in the sun hunting up evidence." Under the Evidence Act, all Indian confessions are inadmissible unless made "in the immediate presence of a magistrate" who has first warned the accused that he need not speak and that anything he does say may be held against...
Under both Czar and commissar, Russia's aim in Eastern Europe since the Pan-Slavism of the mid-19th century has been to dilute nationalism and thereby exert its own will over an area that today contains 120 million inhabitants and represents the world's fourth largest industrial complex