Word: mid-19th
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...mid-19th century America, nothing was more ordinary than the passenger pigeon, which numbered in the billions, and may have accounted for nearly 40% of the country's bird population. Each year they swept across the central and eastern U.S., from the Gulf Coast to Canada and back again in roaring migratory swarms that sometimes darkened the entire sky. They could fly for 20 hours on end with bursts of speed up to 90 miles an hour; yet it sometimes took three days for a flight to pass a given point...
...Executions are so much part of British history," said Viscount Templewood, a Cabinet minister of the 1930s, "that it is almost impossible for many excellent people to think of the future without them." As late as the mid-19th century, when an Englishman could be hanged for 200 different offenses, most of them trivial, 20 or more persons were dispatched at once, and vast festive crowds turned out for the "hanging days" at Tyburn. In recent years, a steady campaign against the death penalty has been fought by lawyers and authors, including Barrister Charles Duff, who dedicated his devastating, sardonic...
Until the mid-19th century, nobody looked at a landscape while painting it. An artist could sketch out of doors, but he repaired to his studio to finish his work. Nature, the neoclassicists held, needed ennoblement by man: the faithful reproduction of it was imitation rather than creativity...
Debate in Steel. In the 18th century Hungarians introduced the modern saber, a descendant of the Mohammedans' curved scimitar, and by mid-19th century, Italians were dueling with the épée. Fencing, the swift and subtle debate in steel, had come...
Feline Charm. Even in his own day, Offenbach was hardly avantgarde. But to Landestheater Director Gerhard Hering, the offbeat choice of Offenbach has a "secret significance" for Angst-ridden Germany. The "aimless and exaggerated prosperity" of mid-19th century Paris, he explains, "seems to bear certain ominous parallels to the Wirtschaftswunder of today." If Offenbach's exuberant music seems "fresh and enchanting," it is because of the swaggering self-assurance with which France's Second Empire "danced over the volcano...