The American cowboy, a bristly breed, had his image carefully groomed by early film studios, and one costumer’s touch, the ornately engraved silver belt buckle, became a staple of Western wardrobes. Though they earned their fame on the movie screen, cowboy buckles are in fact part of a real-world tradition of ornamental metalworking. They began to appear around 1900, when buckles tended to resemble those used by the military.
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January 2011
The Senate tactic known as a filibuster has been much in the news lately. Democrats used the filibuster to stall votes on the nominations of federal appeals court judges and John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations but usually employed the less bellicose term extended debate. (In Bolton’s case, Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader, disagreed, saying it “looks like a filibuster, sounds like a filibuster [and] quacks like a filibuster,” and even Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader, had to agree.) Republicans, meanwhile, backed away from the term “nuclear option,” the radioactive name for their plan to bypass the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to end a filibuster. Instead they began calling it “the constitutional option.”
Online matchmaking services, such as Match.com and eHarmony , today attract millions of users willing to fill out questionnaires—and hand over cash—in the hope of finding love. Can computers really play Cupid? A lot of people seem to think so; eHarmony claims that its service has led to some 10,000 marriages since 2001. But the concept of using computers to smooth the path of romance is far from new. It was hatched by two undergraduates during a bull session at Harvard University in 1965.
“I had the idea that there might be a way to look at the characteristics of males and females to find out what couples might be compatible with each other,” says Vaughan Morrill. He talked to his classmate Jeff Tarr. “We were alone on a Saturday night, and we were drinking, and we came up with the idea of a computer dating system,” Tarr says.
25 Years Ago
October 21, 1980 The Philadelphia Phillies win the only World Series in their history, defeating the Kansas City Royals four games to two.
50 Years Ago
October 8, 1955 The Brooklyn Dodgers win the only World Series in their history, defeating the New York Yankees four games to three.
75 Years Ago
October 30, 1930 Dr. Karl Landsteiner, of the Rockefeller Institute, wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of blood types. He is the first American to win the award.
100 Years Ago
Kimberly Miller Hill has sent us a photo taken, she writes, “… on or shortly after V-J Day, showing a uniquely American depiction of confidence and might. The ‘quarterback’ holds aloft a symbol of destruction, which, in subsequent years, caused controversy riddled with complexity.
He stands beside the stagecoach, his keen eyes squinting into the noonday glare. The four horses are restless, stamping the ground, raising dust into the air. He goes to the front of the team, checking them over with an expert eye, tightening a line here and loosening a strap there. He then climbs the big wheel to the bench, stepping easily over the strongbox bearing the legend BEEKMAN BANK—JACKSONVILLE, OREGON—AGENT OF WELLS, FARGO & CO. It is filled with gold from the Jacksonville mines, destined for San Francisco.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been ruled since 1932 by Abdul Aziz al Saud, who founded the dynasty after conquering assorted tribes of the Arabian desert, and by 5 of his more than 50 sons. Before the 1970s only a handful of Americans knew that U.S. geologists had found oil there and that a conflation of oil companies called Aramco (now Saudi Aramco) was busy turning sand into gold.