Mid Century Quotes & Sayings

The two explorers are given fictional names. But as in real life, they travel to the Amazon roughly a generation apart, in the early-to-mid 20th century. In the film, they're both guided by Karamakate, as a young man early in the story and later as an old shaman. He and the outsiders share a desire for knowledge - self knowledge and an understanding of the world around them, says the film's co-screenwriter, Jacques Toulemonde. — Tom Cole

It's really the story of a young woman, or two women, growing up in Naples in a poor neighborhood. The way that they get out of it - or don't get out of it - that's part of it. But it's also the story of the mid-20th century in Italy so it's really like a social, historical and personal novel. I think that even though I didn't live in Italy in those years, it did cover that same type of generational upbringing that someone like me might've had in America. — Ann Goldstein

To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children's characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite 'universes' presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times. — Alan Moore

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel. — Gay Talese

To be half a century plus is wonderfully exciting, because I haven't lost any of my past, and I am free to stand on the rock of all that the past has taught me as I look to the future. — Madeleine L'Engle

Bringing Israel and modern Zionism into the subject of the Holocaust is to bring current (i.e. late 20th and early 21st Century) issues into a historical event that occurred on another continent altogether in the early-mid 20th Century. — James Morcan

For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections. — Margaret Mead

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being." — John Shelby Spong

The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting. — Andrea Barrett

Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An 'ecological shock' could irreversibly degrade our environment. — Martin Rees

I have a collection of mid-century, small-press science fiction and fantasy hardcovers that is my most focused and dedicated collection. Everything else I tend more to acquire or amass than collect. I have vinyl records I listen to all the time when I work. But I don't collect records. I just buy records where the price seems right and it's music I actually listen to. — Michael Chabon

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'. — Tracy Chevalier

The Papacy attempted to deal with this movement by sending out missionaries, originally Dominicans in 1240, and then Franciscans a century later, in 1340. But it was only in the mid-fifteenth century that the campaign to uproot the heresy began to really bear fruit, and those local Church leaders who refused to recant were forced to emigrate. But despite this, a legacy of Bogomil influence was left in which the local Church was not closely linked to the Papacy, and this was to sow the seeds of future problems.[2] — Donal Anthony Foley

Up until the mid twentieth century the mountain gorilla was considered a myth. Oddly enough, a legend not unlike bigfoot or the loch ness monster. The chance of actually seeing/experiencing this elusive shadow was as likely as finding ones soulmate. Rare. Precious. Even once discovered they seemed unapproachable. The only way to get close to this magnificent creature was to become empathetic. Abandon all pretense and preconceptions. To bare an open throat. To collapse into the arms of vulnerability. All but extinct, these beings/moments are threatened by the black hearted. The cold and oblivious. The empty eyed profit seekers that overlook these rare precious moments. — Maynard James Keenan

After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. — Pankaj Mishra

Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the — Malcolm Gladwell

But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of this century; late years - present years are dusty, sun-burnt, hot, arid; we will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the mid-day in slumber, and dream of dawn. — Charlotte Bronte

Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England's imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might. — William Manchester

Before the mid-20th century, when American libertarians entangled themselves in conservative coalitions against the New Deal and Soviet Communism, "free market" thinkers largely saw themselves as liberals or radicals, not as conservatives. Libertarian writers, from Smith to Bastiat to Spencer, had little interest in tailoring their politics to conservative or "pro-business" measurements. They frequently identified capitalists, and their protectionist policies, as among the most dangerous enemies of free exchange and property rights. — Charles W. Johnson

Gaston Boissier, who wrote in the mid-nineteenth century what is still one of the most charming and witty books on Cicero, observed: He always belonged to the best party [i.e., the optimates] ... only he made it a rule not to serve his party; he was contented with giving it his good wishes. But these good wishes were the warmest imaginable. ... His reserve only began when it was necessary to act. ... The more we think about it, the less we can imagine the reasons he could give [his friends] to justify his conduct. — Anthony Everitt

All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on "calculating machines" had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain. She — Isaac Asimov

Other generations perceived a plethora of swords hanging over their heads. But generally what they feared were shadows, for neither they nor their gods could actually end the world. Fate might reap an individual, a family, or even a whole nation, but not the entire world. Not then.
We, in the mid-twenty-first century, are the first to look up at a sword we ourselves forged, and know, with absolute certainty, it is real ... — David Brin

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. — John Updike

Now let me get this plan for adult living straight. Suppose it is 11 o'clock at night, and I am in my room with my girl and a bottle of bourbon. What..."
"Well, that surely is a happy thought, isn't it?"
-An exchange between a University of Oklahoma student and President George Lynn Cross, mid 20th century — George Lynn Cross

Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp's urinal was one - quite a good one the first time around, corny by mid-twentieth century, and downright stupid today. — Roger Scruton

The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species. — Richard L. Currier

Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century
citizen of the world
will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. — Strobe Talbott

'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled. — Jill Lepore

In mid-20th-century America, it could be argued that the novelist still had the most claim of anyone to omniscience. Whatever he/she couldn't prove, he/she could gesture at. — Joshua Cohen

In the history of the United States, we find that women were regularly preachers on the American frontier. Ironically, Baptists, who in some fundamentalist churches now bar women ministers, had more female preachers than any other denomination. Women pastored almost half of all Baptist churches in the state of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also the case in almost half of the Baptist churches in Michigan and Wisconsin. — Alan F. Johnson

I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism. — Will Sergeant

No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children. — Barbara Ehrenreich

'Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America. — John Lahr

In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century. — Richard Corliss

Allen once recalled that even local blacks doubted the efficacy of an independent black church in Philadelphia, so fearful were they of a white backlash. But after segregated seating policies were instituted at white churches, Allen appeared to be a visionary, and many blacks soon joined his exodus from segregated Northern pews and galleries for independent black churches. For subsequent generations, Allen's act of defiance had all the meaning and power of Rosa Parks's sit-in during the mid-twentieth century. The comparison is not superficial. For while both events - Parks's sit-in and Allen's walkout of segregated pews - were courageous nonviolent acts in and of themselves, they also set the stage for new black freedom struggles. — Richard S. Newman

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. — Noam Chomsky

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me. — Martin Scorsese

the Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools - plus the doctrine of papal infallibility - so they traded. Also, — Gloria Steinem

She stole a glance at Kevin Kimberly...No other man of her acquaintance ever boasted so smooth a shave or as shapely a haircut. — Nancy Paschal

For the developing world, the past half-century has been a time of recurring hope and frequent disappointment. Great waves of change have washed over the landscape, from the crumbling of colonial hegemonies in mid-century to the recent collapse of Communist empires. But too often, what rushed in to replace the old order were empty hopes-not only in the false allure of state socialism, non-alignment and single-party rule, but also the false glories of romantic nationalism and narrow tribalism, and the false dawn of runaway individualism. — His Highness The Aga Khan

Richardson, however, remains a vital figure in the history of the novel, and of ideology. He initiates a discourse on sexual roles which, in all its ambiguities, is as relevant to today's society as it was in the mid-eighteenth century and which fills the pages of hundreds of novels after Pamela and Clarissa. — Ronald Carter

Ten years after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still far more popular than coffee, which only became the more popular drink in the mid-nineteenth century. Coffee's popularity grew after the duty on imports was abolished in 1832, making it more affordable. The duty was briefly reintroduced during the Civil War but was abolished again in 1872. — Tom Standage

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, 'the cult of sepulchral melancholy' and 'graveyard gothic'. — Catharine Arnold

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes ... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year ... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law ... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Ben Farmer brings a legend to life in Evangeline, evoking with grace and panache the travails of the Acadians in mid-eighteenth century America from Nova Scotia to New Orleans. Farmer is a wonderful storyteller, and readers won't soon forget this tale of love and fortitude. Simply riveting. — Keith Donohue

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. — John Keegan

While it cannot be denied that the state's enhanced role in the mid-twentieth century necessitated a larger bureaucracy, or that the officials of CORFO (for instance) served their country well, the suspicion remains that the expanded public administration was (to adapt the celebrated phrase about the British empire) in part a system of indoor relief for the Chilean middle class. — Simon Collier

England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum. — Eric Metaxas

Steve needed to be careful here. He'd read mid-twentieth-century science fiction so he knew that once you started switching realities you ran into problems with nested levels of existence. — Danyl McLauchlan

I know I'm good but I'm also a poser. That's artistic balance! In the second half of the century, "authenticity" would be what you made of it, a hall of mirrors. Put on the work shirt, young man. No big deal. As you get older, it won't concern you. It's just the lay of the land. In your youth, however, you are easy prey for the many tricks of the mind. At this moment, I know my mid is not at its most centered. I can tell because I'm afraid, and that's not my style; I don't need to be, but I am. — Bruce Springsteen

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said.
"Who isn't? — Ruth Ozeki

Even though Pope Urban VIII reversed the pronouncements of his predecessors by declaring slavery unacceptable in the mid-seventeenth century, the vast majority of Protestant Christians in America considered slavery and white supremacy to be absolutely consistent with "biblical" Christianity. It would take American Protestants over a hundred years to make slavery history. Even then, they would find ways to cleverly camouflage the old Doctrine of Discovery and its white supremacist scaffolding under distinctly American terms like Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, terms still celebrated in many sectors of US society today. Professor — Brian D. McLaren

The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines. — Jamie Lee Curtis

As demand for cotton grew, slavery was considered indispensable as a means of maximizing profit for this labor-intensive staple crop. Equally important, as we shall see, slaves could be financed - that is, purchased on credit. In financial parlance this is called leverage. Planters had one objective: increased cotton production. Arguments about the optimum size of a cotton farm are irrelevant because of slavery's financing characteristic. Simply put, the goal was more cotton, which called for financing the purchase of more land and more slaves. Because a mechanical means of solving cotton's production needs did not exist until the mid-twentieth century, cotton demanded an endless supply of black bodies as long as the price of cotton permitted financing. The Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted, — Gene Dattel

The longer the long war gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic, and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable with their post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe. — Anonymous

Peasant families ate pork, beef, or game only a few times a year; fowls and eggs were eaten far more often. Milk, butter, and hard cheeses were too expensive for the average peasant. As for vegetables, the most common were cabbage and watercress. Wild carrots were also popular in some places. Parsnips became widespread by the sixteenth century, and German writings from the mid-1500s indicate that beet roots were a preferred food there. Rutabagas were developed during the Middle Ages by crossing turnips with cabbage, and monastic gardens were known for their asparagus and artichokes. However, as a New World vegetable, the potato was not introduced into Europe until the late 1500s or early 1600s, and for a long time it was thought to be merely a decorative plant.

"Most people ate only two meals a day. In most places, water was not the normal beverage. In Italy and France people drank wine, in Germany and England ale or beer. — Patricia D. Netzley

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy. — Malcolm Gladwell

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century. — Vik Muniz

A technical survey that systematize, digest, and appraise the mid century state of psychology. — Stanley Smith Stevens

I'm ultimately not so much of a professor as a progresser. And I'm ready to move away from what I consider to be this weird mid-century dream that I feel pulls us as a country, and us as a culture, backward. — Christopher Bollen

My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list! — Mark Frauenfelder

When historians consider the significance of the Berlin crises of the mid-20th century, I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view, in my judgment, will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism. — Robert Kennedy

If we don't change from a world society that worships money and power to one that worships compassion and generosity, I think we'll be extinct by mid-century. I don't say that as an alarmist or as a pessimist. — Patch Adams

I find it strange that - at least in my take on it - the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway. Humor is just an ingredient. It's always been in poetry. It kind of dropped out of poetry I think during the 19th and up to the mid-twentieth century. But it's found its way back. And it's simply an ingredient. — Billy Collins

I grew up in a very rationalist household. My father, in particular, came from that mid-century tradition of thinking science will ultimately explain everything. — Andrew Solomon

By the mid second century BCE, the profits of warfare had made the Roman people by far the richest of any in their known world. Thousands upon thousands of captives became the slave labour that worked the Roman fields, mines and mills, that exploited resources on a much more intensive scale than ever before and fuelled Roman production and Roman economic growth. — Mary Beard

Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a "therapeutic space" as much dependent on the city, the factory, and "progress" to define its parameters as on that intangible but much lauded entity called nature. In short, the summer camp should best be read not as a simple rejection of modern life, but, rather, as one of the complex negotiations of modernity taking place in mid-twentieth century Canada. — Sharon Wall

The cold logic of mid-twentieth-century atheism has now given way to an era of renewed 'spirituality,' but it is an awakening more thrapeutic than pious, more attuned to self-expression than self-denial. It is now fashionable to talk about God, though it is still deeply unfashionable to believe in him. — J. Mark Bertrand

It is hard to believe, but the phrase 'workshop of the world' was originally coined for Britain, which today, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has 'no industry'. Having successfully launched the Industrial Revolution before other countries, Britain became such a dominant industrial power by the mid nineteenth century that it felt confident enough to completely liberalize its trade (see Thing 7). In 1860, it produced 20 per cent of world manufacturing output. In 1870, it accounted for 46 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. The current Chinese share in world exports is only around 17 per cent (as of 2007), even though 'everything' seems to be made in China, so you can imagine the extent of British dominance then. — Ha-Joon Chang

During the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Eastern Massachusetts, mid-nineteenth century, there happened to be a very lively press run by working people, young women in the factories, artisans in the mills, and so on. They had their own press that was very interesting, very widely read and had a lot of support. And they bitterly condemned the way the industrial system was taking away their freedom and liberty and imposing on them rigid hierarchical structures that they didn't want. One of their main complaints was what they called "the new spirit of the age: gain wealth forgetting all but self." For 150 years there have been massive efforts to try to impose "the new spirit of the age" on people. But it's so inhuman that there's a lot of resistance, and it continues. — Noam Chomsky

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers. — Charles Murray

If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads. — Stacey D'Erasmo

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore. At — Ryan Hackney

The study of eugenics had its beginning in Germany, sometime after the mid-19th century mark, stimulated by volkish concerns for Aryan racial purity. Rudolf Virchow, pathologist and politician, began a study of national ethnic statistics in 1871, convinced that the majority of Germans would prove to be of relatively pure Nordic descent. The results of his studies proved otherwise. According to Virchow, the obvious solution was to set about Nordicizing the debased German stock. — Jim Keith

The end of something, that specific mid-century American upper-middle-class WASP East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby... I felt nothing but regret. I do not suffer loss well... Their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...dislodged, then replaced...powerful now only in the heads of their children, the children of Little America... When we die, they'll vanish forever. — Henry Bromell

...Americans didn't stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years - so typical a place that it only looks like an exception. — Jerry Herron

Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens. — James Howard Kunstler

In the mid nineteenth century, the typical murderer was a drunken illiterate; a hundred years later the typical murderer regards himself as a thinking man. — Colin Wilson

Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called 'Red Sky in Morning,' set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results. — Alan Cheuse

The trajectory of Parker's critical acceptance has often been charted far below that of her popular acclaim, a curious reversal of the situation of many other mid-twentieth-century writers, who are so often pushed to the front of the group by their very own personal critics, the authors looking a great deal like reluctant children, aware of their limitations, who are shoved onto the stage by aggressively solicitous parents eager for them to perform so that their own talents can be validated. — Dorothy Parker

Articulate each meeting's purpose (Making an announcement? Delivering a report?). Terminate the meeting once the purpose is accomplished. Follow up with short communications summarizing the discussion, spelling out new work assignments and deadlines for completing them. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan's legendary mastery of meeting follow-up helped secure GM's industry dominance in the mid-twentieth century. — Harvard Business School Press

Back in the mid-18th century, in 1745-1747, Ossetia was the first to become part of the Russian Empire. At that time, it was a united entity; North and South Ossetia were one state. — Vladimir Putin

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British. — Nancy Pearl

Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about. — Mauricio Lasansky

I really liked the design aesthetic of the mid-century modern for furniture and the early '60s stuff for the clothes. But then, personally, I'm a huge fan of 1970s muscle cars. Cell phones is just a laziness thing because it's so much easier to have somebody have a cell phone than have to go to a phone booth. So we're sort of, I guess, cherry-picking the best and easiest from several decades. — Adam Reed

I was right when I said a very long time ago that our age would leave few living documents behind it: it was rare for anyone to keep a diary, letters were short and businesslike--"I'm alive and well"--and few memoirs were written. There are many reasons for this. Let me mention just one, not perhaps recognized by everybody: we were too often at loggerheads with our own past to give it proper thought. Within the half-century, our ideas on people and events have changed many times; conversations were broken off in mid-sentence; thoughts and feelings could not but be affected by circumstances. — Ilya Ehrenburg

The mid-19th century was noted for a partisan, rather than a consensus press, but this partisanship was able to turn out voters consistently. — Harold Holzer

The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There's a marker for the first Confederate post office, there's a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there's a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century. — Bryan Stevenson