Word: threat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other politicians pressed hard for nonviolent mass struggle against a Raj dangerously weakened by the threat of Japanese invasion. In 1942 Gandhi reluctantly endorsed the Quit India plan, calling on London for Indian independence "before dawn, if it could be had." He and the Congress leaders were arrested and jailed. Huge demonstrations soon flared into rioting and revolt. Mobs attacked any symbol of British power, and the disorder cut off British communications to its armies at the frontier. Government forces struck back hard, and nearly 1,000 Indians were killed before the uprising flamed out. Gandhi was finally freed...
...Matisse paints The Red Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually the same moment, his great rival Picasso creates his equally masterly Cubist collage Still-Life with Chair Caning and Guitar, which reverses the centuries-old traditions of sculpture, focusing the spectator's eye not on the final effect but on the process and materials by which it is obtained...
Notoriously parsimonious--except for her own fashions--Elizabeth hated war for its costly wastefulness, yet embroiled England ineffectually in the long Continental struggles of the Counter-Reformation. When the Catholic threat of Spain reached its apogee in 1588, her penny pinching nearly cost England its independence before luck and the skill of her sailors defeated the Spanish armada. Yet at the moment of imminent invasion, she dressed in a silver breastplate to address her troops and imbue them with her dauntless courage. "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman," Elizabeth said, "but I have...
...titan on these grounds. It was by no means obvious, in the dark days of 1940, that the Western Allies could prevail against the Axis. His optimism about victory and his conviction that there were truths worth defending to the death were as important as his identifying the threat and standing up to it. Forty years later, when Ronald Reagan approached the cold war as a battle to be not only fought but also won, he was following a Churchillian strategy...
...take a Hitler, a mortal threat, to move the Allied democracies from complacent enclaves to the global powerhouses that by century's end would embrace most of the world's people? Here is a place to draw the line. "It may be true that we've got great medical breakthroughs, radar, sonar because of war," says theologian Marty, "but I don't like to make a theology out of that; it's an accidental product." Rosenbaum agrees that to focus on the benefits is to risk trivializing the tragedy itself. "There are a lot of people who want...