Word: mid-19th
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...building aptly symbolizes the guerrilla warfare between efficiency and mere embellishment that has bedeviled the Foreign Office since the birth of modern diplomacy in the mid-19th century. Even its radiators belong in a museum. Though elderly, blue-liveried porters haul interminable scuttles of coke to feed 500 open fires, wintertime at the Foreign Office is a perpetual struggle. There are electric lights in the chandeliers, but the wiring is so overburdened that only Room 53, the Foreign Secretary's office, rates an electric heater (two, in fact). Telegraphic facilities were installed over the objections of an under secretary...
Before the development of intravenous embalming in mid-19th century (probably by Thomas H. Holmes, who made $400,000 embalming Civil War dead), the dead man laid out in the parlor was a corpse, and there was no doubt about it. But embalming made it possible to mitigate many of the grimmer aspects of death. The resulting display of the deceased has become the focus of a range of gimmickry and hard-selling that has raised the average bill from $350 in 1935 to about $1,400 (including plot) today, and brought on a storm of criticism...
...auctioned for $41,000 by Bernard Harmer, U.S. partner of London's H. R. Harmer Ltd., the world's leading stamp firm. It is a pale blue, unused 2? Hawaiian Missionary stamp-so called because such stamps were mostly used by Christian missionaries writing home in the mid-19th century-and it replaced the renowned British Guiana one-cent magenta ($32,900) as the world's most valuable stamp. Its sale also proved once again that stamp collecting is a lot more than child's play...
...crowds do not give the U.S. the sense of doom that Ortega y Gasset felt when he shuddered about "mass man." Yet, sheer numbers are an overwhelming factor in the individual's existence. Demographers calculate that, given a U.S. population density of ten people per square mile in the mid-19th century, each American inside a ten-mile radius could "interact" with about 3,000 others. But the density in the U.S. today is 60 people per square mile, making possible interaction with nearly 20,000 (in cities the figure rises into the millions...
Desire Under the Elms, by Eugene O'Neill, seems, after 38 years, as familiar as inherited folklore. It is the mid-19th century New England saga of the flinty, greedy. God-bedeviled, lust-maddened Cabot clan and its internecine struggle over the family farm. To possess it. the sons wish their father dead, brother plots against brother, a young woman marries a fanatical old man, seduces his son to obtain an heir, and murders the infant to repossess the son's love. George C. Scott plays the fire-breathing old father Ephraim with monomaniacal force. As the woman...