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Eighties   Listen
noun
eighties  n.  
1.
The decade from 1980 to 1989.
2.
The time of life between 80 and 90.
Synonyms: mid-eighties.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Eighties" Quotes from Famous Books



... days—say from the mid-eighties—professing Christian men, when expostulated with as to the difference between their professed creed of the Sunday, and their daily practice in business, would say, 'oh, bosh! religion is one thing, business is another!' ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... for a supposed reflex disease) swept the whole country during the eighties and threatened the unsexing of the entire female population. The ovaries had the reputation of causing all the trouble that the flesh of woman was heir to. Oophorectomy was the entering wedge, since then everything contained in the ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.

... beginning to set in the blood of that Revolution, which, if he had lived but one year longer, would surely have claimed him as one of its first victims. Three wives he led to the altar—the last when he had passed into the eighties—but no marital duty was allowed to interfere with the amours which filled his life; and to the last no pity ever gave a pang to the "conscience" which allowed him to pick and fling away his flowers at will, and to trample, one after another, on the hearts ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... met him one Fourth of July afternoon in the middle eighties. The sawdust streets and high board sidewalks of the lumber town were filled to the brim with people. The permanent population, dressed in the stiffness of its Sunday best, escorted gingham wives or sweethearts; a dozen outsiders like myself tried not to be too conspicuous in a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... Marxian Socialism and sought to create a purely proletarian movement. As we have seen, when revolutionary terrorism was at its height Plechanov and his disciples had proclaimed its futility and pinned their faith to the nascent class of industrial wage-workers. In the early 'eighties this class was so small in Russia that it seemed to many of the best and clearest minds of the revolutionary movement quite hopeless to rely upon it. Plechanov was derided as a mere theorist and closet philosopher, but he never wavered in his conviction that Socialism must ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... in Oakland, Virginia, April 23, 1853) represents the generation of Southerners who were too young to fight but not to feel during the Civil War. In the middle eighties he published a number of stories in the "Century Magazine" which presented with loving sympathy charming views of the old aristocratic regime that it had become a literary fashion sweepingly to condemn. These tales of courtly ideals on ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... Father De Smet spent nearly forty years among the tribes of the great Western plains and in the Rocky Mountain region. Other missionaries in Western Canada penetrated the North as far as the Arctic Circle. In the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, a frail and slender man, in the person of the learned and saintly Archbishop Charles J. Seghers, journeyed thousands of miles, to bring the message of the Master to the red men in the vast territory of distant Alaska. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... large and well-developed agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and service sectors, Brazil's economy outweighs that of all other South American countries and is expanding its presence in world markets. In the late eighties and early nineties, high inflation hindered economic activity and investment. The Real Plan, instituted in the spring of 1994, sought to break inflationary expectations by pegging the real to the US dollar. Inflation was brought down to ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... whose striding gait caused a hooped and pleated skirt of green silk, surmounted by a bustle, to sway like a lime-tree in a breeze, wore a bodice open in front, with short sleeves, the fag end of some other fashion, but the long draggled-tailed feather boa belonged to the eighties, as did the Marie Stuart bonnet. Her blackened eyebrows and a thickly painted face attracted Dick's attention from afar, and when she approached nearer he was struck by the dark, brilliant, restless eyes. 'A strange and exalted being,' he said to himself. 'An authoress perhaps,' for he noticed ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... assembled at Old Jolyon's to celebrate the engagement of June to Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when again the clan gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with Michael Mont, the state of England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in the eighties it was too congealed and low-percented. If these chronicles had been a really scientific study of transition one would have dwelt probably on such factors as the invention of bicycle, motor-car, and flying-machine; the arrival ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... that of the magnificent ship Northern Light, of which I was part-owner. I had a right to be proud of her, for at that time—in the eighties—she was the finest American sailing-vessel afloat. Afterward I owned and sailed the Aquidneck, a little bark which of all man's handiwork seemed to me the nearest to perfection of beauty, and which in speed, when ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... of view of the fish-stew and the market. As to what has been done in the way of acclimatization it is not necessary to say much. Trout (Salmo fario) were introduced to New Zealand in the late 'sixties from England; in the 'eighties rainbow trout (Salmo irideus) were also introduced from California; now New Zealand provides the finest trout-fishing of its kind in the world. American trout of different kinds have been introduced into England, and brown trout have been introduced to America; but neither innovation ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... it. Darwinism, according to Driesch,[7] "explained how by throwing stones one could build houses of a typical style." In other words, it "claimed to show how something purposively constructed could arise by absolute chance; at any rate this holds of Darwinism as codified in the seventies and eighties." Of course the Blind Chance doctrine breaks down utterly when it comes to be applied to selected cases, and nothing more definitely disposes of it than the very definite law which emerges as the result ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... of hair pasted to her forehead undoubtedly with quince-seed pomatum, her basque wrinkled across her bust because of the high-shouldered cut of it. But it had been in the extreme mode when it was made and worn, in the eighties. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper

... author reaches back into the midst of the conflict to take up the thread of his narrative. The economic conditions and changes of 1861 to 1865 are therefore treated in connection with the great issues of the seventies and eighties—the protective tariff and "big business." The money question, railway regulation, corruption in public affairs, never absent from our national life, are the chief themes of Professor Paxson's book. But while the motif of ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... Away back in the eighties, before the dominance of business in American society had been questioned, efficiency, as the term was then understood, had a place among the elect; it was the intimate associate of business success. Then came the muck-raker, and ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss

... phase of dangerous hostility to France. A practice of sneering at things American has died only very recently out of English journalism and literature, as any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the 'seventies and 'eighties may soon see for himself. It is well too in these days not to forget Colonel Marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must never recur. But in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after the death of Queen ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells

... Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler," not to mention "Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea"—wrote them in his flat in the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, or Christian era—wrote them there and then took them to the Cafe Luitpold, in the Briennerstrasse, to ponder them, polish them and make them perfect. I myself have sat in old Henrik's chair and victualed ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... The Dutch were believed to have sixteen of the line—one seventy-four, seven sixty-eights, and the rest under sixty guns. In Ross's squadron were one three-decker and two eighties. ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... where in the diamond mines he met with great success and made a large fortune. His property there he disposed of to Cecil Rhodes, and it now, I am told, forms part of the De Beers Consolidated Company's assets. In the late eighties he returned to his native island, settled at Peel, and ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... by Charles Warner at the Adelphi Theatre, London in the early eighties) was sung the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer

... it was beyond criticism, and from then to the time of the "greenery-yallery" aesthetic revival all and everything made by woman's fingers ought to be buried, burnt, or otherwise destroyed. Indeed, if that drastic process could be carried out from the time good Queen Adelaide reigned to the early "eighties" we might not, now and ever, have to bow our ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes

... a woman with fine eyes and teeth, as well as a charming manner, but her style of dressing dated back to the eighties—full skirts, flat hats with strings, beaded plush dolmans, etc. Ethel was ashamed to be seen with her but she had promised to help and she had to do her share. In the meanwhile her mother had spread the report that Aunt Susan was a millionaire and that ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... The tents had been pitched during the summer and occupied by successive territorial battalions, and they were not of the thick water-proof cotton canvas variety that we had in Canada. They were the linen kind such as we used to have in Canada in the Eighties, and they were so thin you could count the stars through them, but were all right for ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... President who was succeeded by Reitz and now by Steyn in the presidency of the Orange Free State, appeared to have had early intimations, or at least presages, as to the true nature of the Afrikaner Bond, for during the early eighties that association had yet posed as a harmless body, intended to preserve old Boer traditions upon perfectly constitutional lines. President Brand and some others then already suspected more, as the following incident will show. In 1883 President Brand officially ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... from nothing to L150, so that the income was between L650 and L750. The money was not spent on books only, but included expenditure on binding, periodicals, and on insurance. In the eighties and early nineties insurance premiums on the collection housed in a wooden building were L100 per annum and, though they were reduced, even in the last years of the century, L40 had to be used ...
— Report of the Chief Librarian - for the Year Ended 31 March 1958: Special Centennial Issue • J. O. Wilson and General Assembly Library (New Zealand)

... constant visitor; but he, as you know, was like one of the family. Aside from the habit of Dic's visits, and growing out of them, Madam Bays had dim outlines of a future purpose. Dic's father, who was dead, had been considered well-to-do among his neighbors. He had died seized of four "eighties," all paid for, and two-thirds cleared for cultivation. Eighty acres of cleared bottom land was looked upon as a fair farm. One might own a thousand acres of rich soil covered with as fine oak, walnut, and poplar ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... rest of the House of Commons, they took a course which now seems simple and inevitable. But there is some difficulty in realizing to-day how Irishmen, and more especially Irish members, were viewed in England through the early eighties. Something of the public feeling towards them may be gathered from a string of extracts dealing with another source of dissension in this Cabinet. Sir William Harcourt, as Home Secretary, had adopted determined views of what may be ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... to say we've lorst it. I never see such a thing. There was a gent there as meant to 'ave it. 'Cept for 'im, there wasn't a bid after twenty-five pounds. I never thort we'd 'ave to go over fifty, neither. Might 'a bin the owner 'isself, the way 'e was runnin' us up. An' when we was in the eighties, I sez to meself, I sez, 'The one as calls a nundred first 'as it. So 'ere goes.' 'Eighty-nine,' sez'e. 'A nundred pound,' sez I, bold-like. 'Make it guineas,' sez he, as cool as if 'e was buyin' a naporth o' figs. I tell you. Major, it ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... Jacob Hess, a famous New York Republican politician, was a member of the commission appointed to put the wires underground in New York City, in the "eighties." He stated that when the commission was struggling with the problem, and examining all kinds of devices and plans, patented and unpatented, for which fabulous sums were often asked, the body turned to Edison in its perplexity and asked for advice. Edison said: "All you have to do, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... notice anything that marked our transition from peace to war. Beyond the Nancy, built in the Versailles style by the exiled Stanislaus, lay the industrial Nancy which has grown up since the development of the iron mines of French Lorraine in the eighties. Through this ugly huddle we passed first: there were working men on the sidewalks, gamins in the gutters,—nothing to ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... and the purring of the sea gradually brought me to the line of thought we have been discussing. At that period, towards the end of the 'seventies, it had begun to be fashionable with the public, and later, at the beginning of the 'eighties, it gradually passed from the general public into literature, science, and politics. I was no more than twenty-six at the time, but I knew perfectly well that life was aimless and had no meaning, that everything was a deception and an illusion, that in its essential nature and results a life ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... my companions with some such reflections as those that follow. It is not given (I said) to many of us to have a second time on earth, but this bicycle is having it, and enjoying it. In the distant eighteen-seventies or eighties it was, as a daring innovation, a marvel and a show. Then came (I went on) all the experiments and developments under which cycling has become as natural almost as walking, during which it lay neglected in corners, like the specimen in the London ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... is just what the criticism of yesterday said about him, the criticism of the eighties and nineties, when it was supposed that Velasquez had discovered the art of seeing, and with it the art of painting. It sounds plausible, but not a word of it is true. And yet it remains difficult to show why it is not true, to distinguish between the genius of Poussin and the pedantry of ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... state taxation it is, as a rule, more recent than the universities. Forty years ago many good people regarded the normal school idea as visionary and its realization as a doubtful experiment. Indeed in one western state, as late as the eighties, its legislature debated the abolition of its normal schools on the ground that they were not fulfilling or accomplishing any useful mission. To-day, however, no such charge of inefficiency can be made. The normal schools, like the universities, have proved ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... board for a while, during the hot weather. They found it very close and uncomfortable in that part of the town, with the mercury in the eighties." ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton

... 'you know Charnay, then? It was he who took me there first. Early 'eighties, I think.' He pulled out another volume and turned to the title-page. 'Here we are, "The Ancient Cities of the New World," '87. My copy is only the translation, published two ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... the early eighties, when Alvina was a baby: or even further back, to the palmy days of James Houghton. In his palmy days, James Houghton was creme de la creme of Woodhouse society. The house of Houghton had always been well-to-do: ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... Zermatt dreamed that a wedding had been solemnised in the English church on that September afternoon of the early eighties. Tourists and townsfolk alike had been cheated of a legitimate thrill of interest and speculation. Nor would even the most percipient have recognised as bride and bridegroom the tall dark Englishman, in a rough shooting suit, and the ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... the same height and weight as his valet. He wore a full dark beard, something after the style of the early eighties of last century. His was also a serious countenance, tanned, dignified too; but his eyes were no match for his valet's; too dreamy, introspective. Screwed in his left eye was a monocle down from which flowed a broad ribbon. In public he always wore it; no one about the hotel had as yet seen ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... Lankester's introduction most hospitably; but she was too busy a woman to do as much for us as her kindness suggested, and she had therefore introduced us to another friend—Mrs Maria Porter—a most picturesque, clever, and characteristic figure in Boston society in the eighties. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... raised by a friendly Indian scout from the head of the hostile who originally owned it—and he had lived in Salt Lake City when it was a collection of log shanties within the walls of a wooden stockade. And now here he was, a man away up in his eighties, but still brisk and bright, piloting tourists about the upper floor of a ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... of "Red Riding Hood," written by F.W. Green, and produced at Her Majesty's Theatre, during the 'eighties, an effort was made to compose and invent a piece of pure Pantomime. The Vokes family, J.T. Powers, and ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... seventies and eighties the Freedmen were to a considerable extent disfranchised by means of ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... most conspicuous corner, the other in the middle of the long wall facing the east window, bare save for the framed photographs of Greatorex's family, the groups, the portraits of father and mother and of grandparents, enlarged from vignettes taken in the seventies and eighties—faces defiant, stolid and pathetic; yearning, mournful, ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... despite her sweetness—the little mark of hardness he discerned, of worldliness. For she was as well born as any woman in the city, and her husband was a Constable. He had inherited, so the rector had been informed, one of those modest fortunes that were deemed affluence in the eighties. His keeping abreast of the times was the enigma, and Hodder had often wondered how financial genius had contrived to house itself in the well-dressed, gently pompous little man whose lack of force seemed at times so painfully evident. And yet he was rated ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... found the changes from hot to cold in the normal regions of the earth hard to bear. Perhaps once in two or three years there comes a day when there is no fog, no wind and a high temperature in the coast district. Then there is hot weather, perhaps up in the eighties, and Californians grumble, swelter and rustle for summer clothes. These rare hot days were the only times when one saw on the streets of San Francisco ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... Distinguished Singers in the Seventies and Eighties: Mrs. Margaret C. Pierce, Mrs. Sarah Watkins-Little, Mrs. Blake-Alverson, Mrs. Helen Wetherbee, Mrs. Marriner-Campbell ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson

... were organized, Henry Antes was made captain of company eight, embodying the Nippenose and Pine Creek settlers.[14] But even this is not the complete picture, for when the settlers returned to the region in the eighties, following the Great Runaway of 1778, Antes became sheriff, the chief law enforcement officer of Northumberland County.[15] The popular miller had become the popular leader, a popularity enhanced by his interpretation of the sheriff's role, an interpretation ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf

... was to see Ginger. He went to the Turk Street address. He found a huge frame mansion of the 'eighties converted into cheap lodgings. The landlady, wearing large jet and gold ornaments, eyed him suspiciously. Miss Molineaux no longer lived there. Her present address? She had left none. Thus dismissed, he turned his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... hop-production during the early 'eighties, the romance of hop-picking, on many farms, gave place to a picturesque but undesirable invasion of vagabondage from the large cities. Some farmers continued to choose their pickers from among the better sort of young men and maidens of the neighborhood, but many large growers, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... through this book of mine after so many years I am amused at the way it is colored by the little cults and crazes, and modes of thought of the 'eighties of the last century. They were so important then, and now, if remembered at all, they appear so trivial! It pleases me to be diverted in this way at "A Crystal Age"—to find, in fact, that I have not stood still while the world ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... to it which was intended to yank it back to the religious cult before mentioned in the event of Virginia's marriage or death. Either way considered, it was a rather dubious heritage. But it served to purchase Leslie Manor and the school became a fait accompli. This was in the early eighties and from its opening day the school had flourished. Perhaps this was due to New England energy and culture, or possibly some credit rested with Mrs. Bonnell, the matron, and real head of the house; a sweet lovable, gracious Southern gentlewoman whose own ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... France and the United States in volume of foreign commerce, and in this respect also reached a position second to Great Britain, with a more rapid rate of increase. An emigration of 220,000 a year in the early eighties was cut down to 22,000 in 1900.[1] To assure markets for her manufactures, and continued growth in population and industry, Germany felt that she must strive ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... not sudden. It was not accomplished in a year, nor in a decade. It was going on throughout the first half of Elizabeth's reign. By the beginning of the eighties the church control was disappearing. After 1585 the state had practically ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... India was much greater than after the fiasco of the Ilbert Bill in Lord Ripon's time, and there had been a vast if still unsuspected change since those days in the whole atmosphere of India. Disillusionment in the 'eighties was mainly confined to a small group of Western-educated Indians who had hoped for better things but did not despair of bringing constitutional methods of agitation to bear upon British public opinion. In 1906 the Indian National ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... civilize an Apache than you could civilize a rattlesnake" would rather shock than convince his hearers in the light of present-day progress. The greatest enemy to Indian civilization has been the return of the "spoils system" in the eighties, and the formation of a corrupt "Indian ring" whose ramifications extended so deep and so high that even the most sincere and disinterested despaired of obtaining justice. Yet the average American citizen honestly wants to give the Indian a ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman

... passing vessels looked out of date and old-fashioned. Some veterans of the 'eighties or 'nineties, fit only to sail under a foreign flag according to pre-war standards, may have been dug out of their obscurity to play their part in the war. And a very important part it is. Ships must run, and, at a time when the Admiralty have levied a heavy toll for war purposes upon ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling

... oldest in the country cannot remember one like him—my father is nearer ninety than eighty, and he says that Jesus is a greater man than he ever heard his father tell of, and he was well into the eighties before he died. Now, Sir, as we are near to Peter's house, you'll not mind my telling you that there is no "Sir" or "Master" at Peter's house. But, Philip, has it not already been said that thou ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... psychology are only arising in these present days, and the systematic application of scientific psychology to education and law and industry and social life and medicine is almost at its beginning. While the height of the last realistic wave was in the period of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, of the last century, its last phase, the practical application of physiological psychology, including psychotherapy, ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... conveniently about; in front of each is a vertical half-inch pipe, six or eight feet high, bearing a half bushel of natural-gas flame which burns and tosses night and day, winter and summer, making the Bottom a warm corner of the earth, when the unassisted temperature is in the eighties. It is a bewildering scene, with all these derricks thickly scattered around, engines noisily puffing, walking-beams forever rearing and plunging, the country cobwebbed with tumbling-rods and pipe lines, the shanties of the operatives with their rude lamp-posts, and ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... these years were of unrivaled brilliancy. Browning was seen in all the great houses, and often for two weeks he would dine out every consecutive night. Dr. Corson, whose first visit to Browning was made in the early eighties, gave to a friend in a personal letter this little transcription of his first meeting with the poet, with whom he had long ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... period of the Theosophical Society, which came next, is best known to general readers, but is only an episode in its history. In the early "eighties," we find the society pro-Buddhist, and apparently identifying Buddhism with "the ancient glories of India, spiritual and intellectual," that the society was professedly desirous to revive. We associate the period ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... (but herself) knows! And if it doesn't make knaves and martyrs of them, ten to one it does make fools of 'em. They're worse than a kid with a dollar on circus day; and they use just about as much sense spending their pile, too. You should have heard dad tell about his pals in the eighties that struck it rich in the gold mines. One bought up every grocery store in town and instituted a huge free grab-bag for the populace; and another dropped his hundred thousand in the dice box before it was ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter

... traders, teachers, and missionaries whom she had been compelled to admit. The first of the powers to take advantage of this situation was France, who already possessed a footing in Cochin-China, and was tempted during the colonial enthusiasm of the 'eighties to transform it into a general supremacy over Annam and Tonking. As early as 1874 she had obtained from the King of Annam a treaty which she interpreted as giving her suzerain powers. The King of Annam himself repudiated this interpretation, and ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... that night a chocolate-brown Liberty costume of a Burne Jones pattern. Miss Kent was only twenty-two, and wore rose-color, but the design of her dress was her mother's own. Kent wore an eighties collar with old-oak plaid and a red tie, I ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... from the early 'eighties till now is difficult to describe, because it is a growth of spirit, a gradual change of values, rather than a change in outward form; there has been no definite throwing off, and no definite adoption, of any one system or theory; but the difference between the best Infant ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... insisted upon talking in German, although more of his auditors would have understood him in English. He laid full emphasis upon German achievements and cast doubt upon the claim of "the Englishman Tilden" to have prepared artificial rubber in the eighties. Perkin, of Manchester, confronted him with his new process for making rubber from potatoes, but Duisberg countered by proudly displaying two automobile tires made of synthetic rubber with which he had made ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... that Germans were after all human beings, or that if England had listened to Matthew Arnold in the 'eighties our officers by this time might have added efficiency to their courage and good temper. Perhaps he had himself put a touch of irritant acid into his comment. Back flared the hate. "Who are you, Sir? What are you, Sir? What right have you, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... the middle eighties—none of us play much, being out in space most of the time, you know—sometimes, when my hook is going particularly well, I go ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... on the Links" nor so magnificent a parable as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" will ever cease to be esteemed. How well I remember the eagerness, the delight with which I read those early tales in "Cornhill" away back in the late seventies and early eighties. They were unsigned, after the old unfair fashion, but no man with any sense of prose could fail to know that they were all by the same author. Only years afterwards did I learn who ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the Danish psychologist Lange, independently of each other, put forward this theory in the early eighties of the last century, and it has ever since remained a great topic for discussion. According to the theory, the emotion is the way the body feels while executing the various internal and expressive movements that occur on such occasions. The "stirred-up state ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... colours were rubbed and cracked in places, but one could still make out the faces. The portrait in the centre was that of a young woman in a white gown with lace ruffles, her hair done up high, in the style of the eighties of last century. On her right, upon a perfectly black background, there stood out the full, round face of a good-natured country gentleman of five-and-twenty, with a broad, low brow, a thick nose, and a good-humoured smile. The French powdered coiffure was utterly out of keeping with the ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... of forms of such transmitters came into use in the early eighties, and while they in some measure remedied the difficulty encountered with the Blake transmitter, i.e., of not being able to carry a sufficiently large current, they were all subject to the effects of extreme ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... course, is old-fashioned; if one may say it of a French farce, it is Victorian. Apart from a few topical allusions worked in rather perfunctorily there is scarcely anything said or done that might not have been said or done in the 'eighties. But for a certain type of Englishman there is a perennial attraction in feeling that at any moment the proprieties may be outraged. That they never actually are outraged does not seem very greatly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various

... in the early fifties and ends thirty years later in the early eighties of last century. It then found its way into the Buenos Ayres newspapers, and I heard it at the time but had utterly forgotten it until this Florida paper came ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realise that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... correspondence, the greater part of which has been lost. They are to be found in the untranslated collated works of Saint-Evremond, and are very curious, inasmuch as they were written when Ninon and Saint-Evremond were in their "eighties." ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... tall or short, fat or lean, are related to the activity of a gland of internal secretion in the head, the pituitary, which became a centre of interest in the late eighties. Because of its situation, the opinion of the ancients was that it was the source of the mucus of the nose, an opinion reinforced by the greatest anatomist of the Dark Ages, Galen, and held up to the seventeenth century. In other words, it was considered simply a gland of external secretion. Experimental ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... on the white monotony of unthawing snow. No one could admire more than I the chaste beauty of the feathery flakes, or the gorgeous sparkle of trees bereft of leaves and covered with crystals that flashed every hue of the rainbow. But even in this bright September day, with the mercury among the eighties, I get chilled through and through, and shake with the "shivers" when I imagine myself once more among the hard frosts of New Hampshire. Unlike the brave soldier of Christ whom I am about to introduce ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... spring wheat to the acre, without any danger of "fevernager;" to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply after corner stakes, at a little distance from the road, it was just so many quarter sections, "eighties," and "forties," to be bought low and sold high whenever opportunity offered; to Jim it was a good country for staging, except a few "blamed sloughs where the bottom had fell out." But the enthusiastic eyes of young Albert Charlton despised ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... twenty years ago: She was born in 1872, as Who's Who will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous cures in the 'sixties, 'seventies and 'eighties, chiefly by dieting and psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year for reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted, thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.) ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... fortunes—put it upon a precarious basis: there was all too slight a margin against encroachments. And, besides, the discovery came to be made, some years later, that it was upon the wrong side of the river altogether. But it held up well in 1873; and it continued to do so through the eighties. Perhaps it was not until the middle or later nineties that the real exodus began. Some of the early magnates had died; some had evaporated financially; others had come to perceive, either for themselves or through their children, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorously interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains, Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells and coal mines. His mines supplied his coke ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... perhaps it means more to be somebody nowadays, in the howling fight for place and acknowledgment, than it meant in the latter part of the nineteenth century. How easy life was in the early eighties, compared with this, how mild were the ways of nations, how primitive, pure and upright the dealings of financiers in that day of pristine virtue and pastoral simplicity! It was all very well to be an idealist then, Mr. Lushington sometimes said to Margaret; ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... man in all America at this time was Wm. Dean Howells who was in the full tide of his powers and an issue. All through the early eighties, reading Boston was divided into two parts,—those who liked Howells and those who fought him, and the most fiercely debated question at the clubs was whether his heroines were true to life or whether they were caricatures. In many homes he was read aloud with ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... better set down and make enough, because they won't see a cent of our money if there's so much as a canteen lacking. And tell 'em to send army guns. That last assortment of junk they sent out was pathetic. I want equipment for fifty U.S. Cavalry, time of the early eighties. That don't mean forty-nine—get me? You're inclined to let those fellows have it their own way too ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower

... now, after the lapse of thirty years, it would seem that the government would have done better if it had given less of the land which was to prove so valuable, and had, instead, guaranteed the dividend on the stock for a term of years. In the eighties, however, western acres were held in little esteem and money guarantees, with Grand Trunk memories fresh, looked dangerous—and it was in the eighties that the decision had ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton

... reasonable grounds for expecting a reversal of the events of 1871, came to the conclusion that autonomous liberties would be at any rate preferable to the naked repression, at the hands of Bismarck and Manteuffel, of the eighties and early nineties. The young men of his date decided that the whole government of the province could not any longer be left to the German bureaucrat, and a certain small number of them entered the German administration, which was imposed on the province after ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Californian assumes that his neighbor is born in the State—Condy was wont to reply that he was "bawn 'n' rais'" in Chicago; "but," he always added, "I couldn't help that, you know." His people had come West in the early eighties, just in time to bury the father in alien soil. Condy was an only child. He was educated at the State University, had a finishing year at Yale, and a few months after his return home was taken on the staff of the San Francisco "Daily Times" as an associate ...
— Blix • Frank Norris

... went to New York early in October, and took a little furnished flat for the winter on the West Side, between two streets among the Eighties. It was in a new apartment-house, rather fine on the outside, and its balconies leaned caressingly towards the tracks of the Elevated Road, whose trains steamed back and forth under them night and day. At first they thought it rather noisy, but their young nerves were strong, and ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... As an outcome of the cumulative action of these factors, the generation which follows a season of war is apt to witness a rehabilitation of the element of status, both in its social life and in its scheme of devout observances and other symbolic or ceremonial forms. Throughout the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the seventies also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more direct and unmediated of these expressions ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... let Spencer know. He pointed out that just because it was his habit to warm the study during the winter months, there was no reason why Spencer should light the gas-stove on an afternoon in the summer term when the thermometer was in the eighties. Spencer thought he might want some muffins cooked for tea, did he? Kennedy earnestly advised Spencer to give up thinking, as Nature had not equipped him for the strain. Thinking necessitated mental effort, and Spencer, in Kennedy's opinion, had no mind, but rubbed along on a cheap substitute ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... discourage young girls from visiting bachelors in their rooms. I was born in the 'eighties, and I don't seem to ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

... defect of protection by adequate dispositions; and this he failed to do. Numerically his force was the same as Nelson's; but, while the latter had only seventy-fours, there were in the French fleet one ship of one hundred and twenty guns, and three eighties. In a military sense, every line divides naturally into three parts,—the centre, and the two ends, or flanks; and it is essential that these should so far support one another that an enemy cannot attack any two in ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... extraction, her father having been grandson of Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin. Miss Cobbe was an active woman in all kinds of journalistic and philanthropic enterprises in the London of the 'seventies and 'eighties of the last century, writing in particular in the now defunct newspaper, the Echo, and she wrote dozens of books and pamphlets, all of them forgotten except her Autobiography,[231] in which she ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... "New South", used by Lanier and others, is meant in no way as a reproach to the Old South, — it is simply the recognition of a changed social life due to one of the greatest catastrophes in history. In the early eighties it was employed by four Georgians, who had a right to use it, — Benjamin H. Hill, Atticus G. Haygood, Henry Grady, and ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... life of the man who bore the chief part in framing and moulding the Haskalah of the "eighties," which was devoted to the development of Hebrew literature and the rejuvenation of the Hebrew people. Loving the Hebrew tongue with a passion surpassing everything else, he censured the German Jewish ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... prosperity followed the building of the road. Settlers poured into the West by tens of thousands, eastern investors promoted colonization companies, land values soared, and speculation gave a fillip to every line of trade. The middle eighties were years of achievement, of prosperity, and of confident hope. Then prosperity fled as quickly as it had come. The West failed to hold its settlers. Farm and factory found neither markets nor profits. ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... where money, if you had enough of it, was more sure to procure you the information that you required. Ever since the late General Brackenbury was at the head of the Intelligence Department of the War Office in the eighties secret funds have been at its disposal, but they have not been large, and there have always been plenty of desirable objects to devote those funds to. Had the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1906 taken the line that, even admitting an attack upon the Straits ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell



Words linked to "Eighties" :   decade, decennary, decennium, years, eld, age, mid-eighties, 1980s, time of life, geezerhood, old age, 1880s



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