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Showing posts from 2019

New ideas of living

Throughout millennia, people have fostered some pretty irrational ideas about how infectious diseases such as plague and cholera were spread. Some of those notions—like the idea that the ancient Cyprian plague could be caught simply by staring into the face of someone afflicted—seem laughable, like something the Monty Python troupe might have sprinkled into one of their medieval parody scripts for television. Yet even as waves of disease washed again and again over population centers, it took centuries for science to fully understand the invisible world of microbes. Until that happened, people under pandemic siege tried to explain the overwhelming amount of death they saw in different ways. Some used simple observations, while some turned to fervent beliefs. Others viewed the cataclysm through the lens of their long-held biases, while still others processed the carnage through superstitions and bizarre theories. When masses of people started inexplicably dying, many early cultur

Changing Generation Digitally

The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late 1800s, though Americans quickly came to dominate the automotive industry in the first half of the twentieth century. Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that became standard, and Ford, General Motors and Chrysler emerged as the “ Big Three ” auto companies by the 1920s. Manufacturers funneled their resources to the military during World War II, and afterward automobile production in Europe and Japan soared to meet growing demand. Once vital to the expansion of American urban centers, the industry had become a shared global enterprise with the rise of Japan as the leading automaker by 1980. Although the automobile was to have its greatest social and economic impact in the United States, it was initially perfected in Germany and France toward the end of the nineteenth century by such men as Gottlieb Daimler,  Karl Benz , Nicolaus Otto and Emile Levassor. The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhe