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10 1. MAN'S FIRST FLIGHT IN HEAVIER-THAN-AIR MACHINE (Dec. 17, 1903)
2. THE GREAT POWERS GO TO WAR IN EUROPE (Aug. 1, 1914)
15 3. THE BOLSHEVIC REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA  (Nov. 7, 1917)
     4. LINDBERGH FLIES THE ATLANTIC ALONE (May 21, 1927)
5.HITLER BECOMES CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY (Jan. 30, 1933)     
20 6. ROOSEVELT IS INAUGURATED AS PRESIDENT
(March 4, 1933)
7. SCIENTISTS SPLIT THE ATOM, RELEASING
INCREDIBLE POWER
(Jan. 28, 1939)     
25 8. THE NIGHTMARE AGAIN - WAR IN EUROPE
(Sept. 1, 1939)
9. SURPRISE JAPANESE BOMBING OF PEARL HARBOR (Dec.7,1941)
10. MEN LAND ON MOON (July 20, 1969)
30   . It is certainly a curious list, as perhaps any such list inevitably would be.... Even on its own terms
Daniel's list provokes challenges. How it is possible in evaluatin the political turmoils of this century to omit
the Chinese Communist revolution, which is not only the major event in the lives of one- third of the earth's
35 inhabitants, but also the first such revolution among the world's non-white peoples? By  contrast, how could
any list of the century's greatest events include Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic?
40 Heroic though it was, symbolic though it was, the flight was one of those hyped* events by which America
of the 1920s celebrated its excitement at being itself.
*hyped — exaggerated (informal)
C. One of the most striking aspects of Daniel's list is that five of his ten choices deal more or less with
World War II, which is understandable enough for a man who spent much of his professional life covering
that cataclysm and its consequences.
45 Yet there is something relentlessly newspaperish about the implication that the great events of history
mostly involve war and politics. World War II involved an awful carnage — at least 35 million dead — but
far  more  people  than that  have been kept alive by the  invention of penicillin  and other  antibiotics,  not to
50 mention the pesticides that eradicated many epidemic diseases, a scientific revolution that helped double the
world's population just since 1950.
D. Which really has had more of an effect on American lives — a major military blow like Pearl Harbor
  55 or some subtler event like the spread of television? Pearl Harbor or the automobile? Pearl Harbor or the
computer? Pearl Harbor or the building of the welfare state? Pearl Harbor or the rise and fall of cheap
energy? Pearl Harbor or the birth of the birth control pill?
60     E. These are all slow-moving developments, of course, and probably no single headline ever announced
any one of them. Indeed, even political news is often hard to judge all at once...
     F. As time passes all politicians (and generals) come to seem less important; what lasts is art.
«Literature», said Ezra Pound, «is news that stays news.» Many Americans can remember that Calvin
65 Coolidge was the inconsequential President when Scott Fitzgerald published «The Great Gatsby», but as we
look back, the political powers keep fading, while the names of artists like Fitzgerald and his friend
Hemingway become
70 familiar household words.
    G. But in the cultural history, just as in political history, we may know very little of what will eventually
turn out to be important.... For all we know, the greatest artists and thinkers, too, remain almost completely 
75 unknown, maybe only temporarily living in poverty and obscurity like Bela Bartok and Vladimir Nabokov
in the 1940s, or else already long dead.
         H. It is interesting that Daniel's list includes only one event of the past 42 years, a period in which much  
has happened but remains mysterious. Journalism (and history too) is what lives in that all too brief gap
80 between the not yet known and the already forgotten.
TIME magazine, October 12, 1987
Exercise:
1. List all the references to specific people, concepts or events that the writer assumes that the reader is
familiar with (apart from those in Daniel's list).
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