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Fifties   /fˈɪftiz/   Listen
Fifties

noun
1.
The decade from 1950 to 1959.  Synonym: 1950s.
2.
The time of life between 50 and 60.  Synonym: mid-fifties.






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"Fifties" Quotes from Famous Books



... father and the other Federalists on the question of men and measures during the War of 1812, so I should have taken other ground than his had I been born and old enough to have opinions in the stirring ante-bellum days of the fifties. And yet, as hindsight makes our vision clearer than foresight, it is impossible to say definitely what our opinions would have been under other conditions, and there can, at any rate, be no question ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... experience, Mrs. Humphrey wrote a number of poems. Her work in later years has been only prose. Her novel, "The Squatter Sovereign" is an historical romance of pioneer days, the settlement of Kansas in the fifties. ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker

... streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for prosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type. There must have been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... end of the eighteen hundred and fifties, when the new power looms were being introduced from America. No toil profited anything. The cheap product which the machines could furnish destroyed the sale of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... silver sugar-loaf buttons—sent me all her messages—one day in the week to her banker's to cash a check. Would you believe the cunning of the creature? She used to draw out 25 pounds every week, sending me for the money, and, as I found out afterwards, paid it in again in fifties every fortnight, and she only had 50 pounds in all. Wasn't I regularly humbugged? Made proposals—was accepted—all settled, and left off talking about her departed. One day, and only two days before the wedding, found the street-door open, and heard a noise between her ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... worked six weeks along the docks as roustabout for money to take him back into the hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes. For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of the California creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he joined a mad stampede to the Frazer River gold-fields in British Columbia, still wild over its first knowledge of silver sulphurets, he was drawn back by the wonder-tales of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... so," he answered, smiling. Miss Winter looked at Etheldred reprovingly, and she shrank into herself, drew apart, and indulged in a reverie. She had heard in books of girls writing poetry, romance, history—gaining fifties and hundreds. Could not some of the myriads of fancies floating in her mind thus be made available? She would compose, publish, earn money—some day call papa, show him her hoard, beg him to take it, and, never owning whence it came, raise the building. Spire and chancel, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... Major. "No need to ask the young un's breed. He's a pukka Chinn. 'Might be his father in the Fifties over again." ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... and interesting thing about the Twayne edition is the essay that forms the introduction to that volume, and is reprinted here. The essay is by Dr. John D. Clark, an eminent scientist of the fourties and fifties and one of the discoverers of sulfa, the first "miracle drug." It describes in great detail the planetary system of the star Beta Hydri, and gives the names of those planets: Uller and Niflheim. A publisher's note states that Clark's essay was written first, and given to the contributors ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

... exiles, held up to them the example of the Pilgrim Fathers who left their native land to obtain political and religious liberty. Furthermore, some Negroes like Martin R. Delaney, who had at first fearlessly opposed the colonization of the blacks in Africa, began during the fifties to promote the emigration of the free people of color to other parts. Many of this persuasion went to Canada West ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... this friendship I must mention the friendship with Carlyle. Carlyle had some intercourse with my father in the 'fifties.' My father, indeed, had thought it proper to explain, in a rather elaborate letter after an early conversation, that he did not sympathise with one of Carlyle's diatribes against the Church of England, though he had not liked to protest at the moment. Carlyle responded ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... inches, and this had been hammered fairly hard by the winter winds. Still the surface over which we traveled was very uneven, and in many places was distinctly trying to the sledges, the wood of which was made brittle by the low temperature, now in the minus fifties. On the whole, however, I felt that if we encountered nothing worse than this in the first hundred miles from the land we should have ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... enthralling accounts of it. An old sea captain whom I met on the pier at Southampton, in reply to my inquiry, said: "Yes! I have seen the phantom ship, or at any rate a phantom ship, once—but only once. It was one night in the fifties, and we were becalmed in the South Pacific about three hundred miles due west of Callao. It had been terrifically hot all day, and, only too thankful that it was now a little cooler, I was lolling over the bulwarks to get a few mouthfuls ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... between our world and that of the spirits. Hence when a number of people professed to have such communication, she was not merely ready to listen to their claims, but was by temperament inclined to accept them. The immense vogue which spiritualism had during 'the fifties' tended to confirm her belief. It was easy to say that where there was so much smoke there must be fire. And what she believed, she believed strongly and with a perfect conviction that no other view could be right. Just as her ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... skates with Madame; invites Madame to sing at the Tuileries; the domino his favorite disguise; dances the Virginia reel; places Madame next to him at dinner; a distorted joke; takes command of the army; his death. New York mansion of the late fifties. Nilsson in ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... was the ready answer. "I went there in the year fifty-five." (I quote this from memory, but it was in the fifties certainly.) ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates

... interesting man of middle age, was a native of York State and retained many of the traditions of his old home strangely blent with a store of vivid memories of Colorado, Utah and California, for he had been one of the gold-seekers of the early fifties. He loved to spin yarns of "When I was in gold camps," and he spun them well. He was short and bent and spoke in a low voice with a curious nervous sniff, but his diction was notably precise and clear. He was a man of judgment, and a citizen of weight ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... without stress on either side.... No, you mustn't leave the piano, Doris. Sing me some songs. Go on singing Schumann or Schubert; there are no other songs. Let me hear you sing 'The Moonlight' or 'The Lotus-flower.' Schumann and Schubert were the singing birds of the fifties; I love their romantic sentimentalities, orange gardens, south winds, a lake with a pinnace upon it, and a nightingale singing in a dark wood by a lonely shore; that is how they ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... a prominent place in the history of New Brunswick. Mr. Gideon Palmer, a son of Gideon (first), was one of the successful shipbuilders of Dorchester in the fifties, and Philip, another son, was for some years a member of the New Brunswick Legislature. The late Judge Palmer, of St. John, was ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman

... been intended for Wilkin, a later Serjeant and well-known in the 'fifties, and whose style and manner is reproduced. We could not ask a better junior in a "touch and go" case. He was as ready to take advantage of any opening as was the late Lord Bowen, when he was junior in the ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald

... the Tinpot Gully diggings, now known to fame by a far more euphonious title, that early in the fifties I spent my first Christmas in Australia. There were all sorts and conditions of men there, men from every nation and every class. Englishmen and Italians, Russians and Portuguese, Persians, Chinamen, and negroes, sons of peers and London pickpockets, all rubbed ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt

... forsooth, the producers and venders of it will lose their profits if it be abandoned? Shall the intellect, and health, and comfort, and wealth, and lives of hundreds and thousands of our fellow citizens, be sacrificed yearly; and widows and orphans be multiplied by scores and fifties, in every section of this wide-spreading country; and one of the prominent auxiliaries of intemperance,—and consequently of crime, and insanity, and eternal woe—be cherished; and twenty-five millions of dollars be wasted, ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler

... forewoman's back is turned. Companionship is the great stimulus. I am confident that without the social entrain, the encouragement of example, it would be impossible to obtain as much from each individual girl as is obtained from them in groups of tens, fifties, hundreds ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... Hancock wrote of studying in a private school in Newbern, North Carolina;[2] John S. Leary went to one in Fayetteville eight years;[3] and W.A. Pettiford of this State enjoyed similar advantages in Granville County during the fifties. He then moved with his parents to Preston County where he again had the opportunity to attend a special school.[4] About 1840, J.F. Boulder was a student in a mixed school of white and colored pupils in Delaware.[5] Bishop J.M. Brown, a native of the same ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... for this world, Bill, not in the ordinary course of nature. And when I've laid you to rest under the rock-pile, Lahoma ain't going to find the variety in me that she now has in the two of us. Besides which, I'm in the fifties myself, and ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis

... Early in the fifties there was living in Moscow, in very straitened circumstances, almost in poverty, the numerous family of the Princes Osinin. These were real princes—not Tartar-Georgians, but pure-blooded descendants of Rurik. Time, however, had dealt ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... Graham Parker rich. They, like Malcolm Monroe, had married, and had built themselves homes. They had invested and re-invested their money; they had given their children advantages, according to their lights. Now, in their early fifties, they were a power in the town, and they felt for it a genuine affection and pride, a loyalty that was unquestioning and sincere. In the kindly Western fashion these two were now accorded titles; Cyrus, who had served in the Civil War, was ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... ultimo; since which yours of the 21st has been received. Bache had put five hundred copies of Monroe's book on board a vessel, which was stopped by the early and unexpected freezing of the river. He tried in vain to get them carried by fifties at a time, by the stage. The river is now open here, the vessels are falling down, and if they can get through the ice below, the one with Bache's packet will soon be at Richmond. It is surmised here that Scipio ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... where the heavy play goes on," Boldero said. "None of your four or five guineas wagers there, fifties and hundreds are nearer the mark, and I have seen a thousand wagered many a time. It is exciting work even looking on, I can tell you; what it must be for the players I cannot say, but I should think ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... could formulate her fears as to the reception of "round dances," Brooks had darted to the piano, and the next moment she heard with a "fearful joy" the opening bars of a waltz. It was an old Julien waltz, fresh still in the fifties, daring, provocative to foot, swamping to intellect, arresting to judgment, irresistible, supreme! Before Mrs. Wade could protest, Brooks's arm had gathered up her slim figure, and with one quick backward sweep and swirl ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... Lindenau; and dead Were fifties, hundreds, tens; And every current rippled red With ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy

... itself has acquired for the corn and other artificial food it finds upon the cultivated farms, we cannot say, but certain it is, that not only patches, but whole acres of corn in many situations are this year destroyed by their nightly inroads, coming as they do in droves of fifties and hundreds. As an instance we may mention that on Mr. Gunn's farm at the Coal River alone, a fine field of five acres of wheat has lately been completely eaten down by them. Many persons are in consequence falling on the expedient of catching them in wires and pitfalls ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various

... In the forties and fifties poaching was carried on in so openly defiant a manner, and on so formidable a scale, as is seldom heard of in these days. The writer was a party concerned in the following incident, not, be it said, in ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... own home—a handsome and yet shabby brownstone house in the West Fifties—he appeared to better advantage. There was a brightness in his plain face when he looked at his wife, and an adoring response in her glance that after twelve years of married life seemed admirable to Rachael. "Alice" ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... come! They're overhead! They've gained the main deck! Hark! Shut to the door and hold it tight, boy. Down come the Frenchmen, helter-skelter! They're flying for their lives! They're coming down by dozens, twenties, fifties! They've given way fore and aft! All hands are shouting for quarter! Hurrah, boy! Hurrah, True Blue! That cheer, I know it. The Frenchman's flag is down! Once more we've the glorious British ensign above our heads! Here come our fellows, open ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... Act II three hours later. PROFESSOR HOLDEN is seated at the table, books before him. He is a man in the fifties. At the moment his care-worn face is lighted by that lift of the spirit which sometimes rewards the scholar who has imaginative feeling. HARRY, a student clerk, comes hurrying in. ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... Mount Olivet church was old. And like, all other things old she had a history, partly respectable and partly otherwise. The date of her organization reached back into the fifties, before the days of the Civil War. Some great notables had lived and died in this church. Tradition had it that one of the charter members of this church was a candidate for president of the United States against James Buchanan. Of course he was not elected, as you know, and I ...
— The Deacon of Dobbinsville - A Story Based on Actual Happenings • John A. Morrison

... for his illusions, if one may call them illusions. Mr. Carver was a shy, sensitive man well along in his fifties, with a wife twelve years his junior. He pretended to cultivate his small farm in Merrytown, but as a matter of fact he lived off of a comfortable income left him by his very capable father. He spent most of his time reading the eighteenth-century ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks

... (about four years older than Flint) he was in his fifties: a devil-may-care old codger (old to a fifteen-year-old, that is) full of good humour and indulgence for a youthful admirer who had journeyed far to meet him. He casually referred to his 600 published stories, and I carried away the impression of one who resembled both in output and in looks that ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... tribunes, as it is in the vulgar Latin; or phylarchs, that is, princes of the tribes, sitting upon twelve thrones, and judging the twelve tribes of Israel; and next to these he chose rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, which were the steps and rise of this commonwealth from its foundation or root to its proper elevation or accomplishment in the Sanhedrim, and the congregation, already opened ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington

... the steward. Two of the three members domiciled there came up to pay their respects when she alighted from the muddy buckboard sent to the railway to meet her; they were her husband's old friends, Colonel Hyssop and Major Brent, white-haired, purple-faced, well-groomed gentlemen in the early fifties. The third member was out in the rain ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... the early fifties of the last century a vote had been taken on the two men in America who ten years later would stand head and shoulders above their countrymen in position and recognized ability, it is probable that not one single vote would ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... not pleasant enough to atone for the rest of the opera. For, to sum up, there is small interest in the drama, and, on the whole, smaller beauty in the music, of "La Traviata." It was made, as bonnets were made, to sell in the fifties; like the bonnets sold in the fifties, it is hopelessly out of date now; and it wants the inherent vitality that keeps the masterworks alive after the fashion in which they were written has passed away. The younger Verdi is not, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... fifties I was cabin-boy on the whaling-ship Nimrod, Alarson Coffin, master. We were cruising on the coast of Brazil when, one day, the lookout, stationed at the masthead, reported a large school of sperm-whales off ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... visitors of importance show a tendency to dwell upon the character of the Bohemians in general rather than on the beauty of their capital. With keen perception they draw the deeper meaning from out the stones of Prague; thus in the fifties of the last century writes Viollet-le-Duc, "Prague est une capitale dans laquelle on sent la puissance d'un grand peuple," and Massieu de Clerval is yet more emphatic: "si un pays peut se vanter d'une nationalite indestructible c'est a coup sur ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... first hand, any possible information in regard to reminiscences of Bret Harte, Mark Twain and others of the little coterie of writers, who in the early fifties visited the mining camps of California and through stories that have become classics, played a prominent part in making "California" a synonym for romance, led to undertaking the tramp of which this brief narrative is a record. The writer met with unexpected ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley

... teeth still good and eyes good, in spite of his fifties; still that amazing imagination which brings nearer and enlarges all objects with the power of a telescope. He remains the same man as he of whom the brave Commander Bravida used to ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... MRS., b. Indiana. Came to California in early fifties. Wrote sketches and poems for newspapers and magazines. Made selection of poems to which Bret Harte's name was attached, known as "Outcroppings." Address: 1034 ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... git one cent more'n two dollars for taking us, I can tell you that," announced Henry Smith, firmly but breathlessly, as he climbed clumsily into the cab after his wife. The hotel was in the fifties, and the cabman had intended to charge a dollar for the ride. He promptly protested against Mr. Smith's offer, however, inquiring anxiously if the gentleman wished an honest cabman's family to go supperless to bed. It appeared that the gentleman was indifferent to the fate ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... accorded well with my temperament and I wondered how I had ever endured those weary years far from the center of the country's financial life, its theaters and its great human drama. Give me the old Times Square and the East Fifties any day and you can keep Death Valley and functional architecture. I was at home at last and I foresaw a future of slow but sure progress toward a position of eminence and respectability. The undignified days of Miss ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... more than double hire for working on the Gold Coast. These races, Kruboys, Grebos, and their cognates, have not improved during the last score of years. Their headmen were old hands approaching the fifties: now they are youths of twenty-five. The younger sort willingly engaged for three years; now they begin to notch their tallies for every new moon, and they wax home-sick after the tenth month. Once they were content to carry home a seaman's chest well filled with ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... are not always paid at maturity. A failure of one firm brings down others, and renewals are urgently required from banks just when they are least able to grant them. Salable securities are on such occasions an ark of safety, and, dating from the early fifties, this class of securities has always been the basis of a large amount of the loans of the banks of Wall Street and their near neighbors of the same class in lower ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... of the proposed exhibition, and many, including myself, went out to see it. There were present seven hundred aborigines of all ages and both sexes. The performances were chiefly by the younger men, in bands of fifties, for the respective tribes, while the females, in lines by themselves, beat the time, and gave what they no doubt considered to ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... some converted looks at the gentleman, and judging him to be the mysterious unknown in whom the late Captain Stroke had taken such a reprehensible interest. He was a stout, red-faced man, stepping firmly into the fifties, with a beard that even the most converted must envy, and a frown sat on his brows all the way, proving him possibly ill-tempered, but also one of the notable few who can think hard about one thing for at ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... end of the fifties I was greatly moved at reading in a musical paper the account of a concert at Eisleben, consisting of parts of Tannhauser, at which my former master, who had not forgotten his young pupil, had ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... your great-grandmother wore as a bride at the Court of Versailles in the fifties. She was only a lassie, and seemed like her husband's daughter. The Prince danced with her, and they counted the dress something to be kept, and that night Locheil and Cluny also had a reel with Sheena Carnegie, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... the Rev. John Ellery, the young divinity student, who was to take the place of old Parson Langley, minister in the parish for over thirty years. Discussion in the village had now reached a critical point, for the Reverend John was expected by almost any coach. In those days, the days of the late fifties, the railroad down the Cape extended only as far as Sandwich; passengers made the rest of their journey by stage. Many came direct from the city by the packet, the little schooner, but Mr. Ellery had written that he should probably come ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln

... to the Virginia battlefields the two brothers were accompanied by Mrs. Clay and her sister-in-law. Mrs. Clay had been a popular belle in Washington in the fifties, and was well acquainted with leading men and women throughout the country. She had heard and met in social circles Charlotte Cushman, Jenny Lind, Thackeray, Lord Napier, and other notabilities. Lanier, eager always to hear of the larger ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... pecuniarily unprofitable. Yet at the same time outlay on a library is a relative term, and one individual may account himself as frugal in expending L30,000 in the course of a lifetime, as another may do in expending L300. The late Earl of Ashburnham bought in chief measure during the forties and fifties, when the reaction from the bibliomania still more or less sensibly prevailed, and considering his Lordship's position and resources, he was not much more lavish than the above-mentioned Mr. Pyne, or indeed any other amateur of average calibre, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... should like to know what officer in the service, under the circumstances, could do more. We were ordered to keep the frigate always in sight, and as the prize sailed well, we had little difficulty in doing that. In the day time we collected the poor blacks to come on deck in fifties at a time, and walk up and down. We had a black man on board the frigate, who was now sent with us, and he understood the language of some of the slaves. I had not forgotten the poor boy whose mother I had seen die, and I got permission for ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston

... experience in battle, they had come to know how to handle them. It would have been an immense saving to have filled up and made these weak regiments strong by sending to them from rendezvous camps recruits by the fifties. The new men would have rapidly taken up and learned their duties in the field from contact with the men who had learned what they knew from actual service. Then, the officers in these old regiments had got weeded out. The cowards and weaklings had, generally, been discharged, ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller

... was of course an offence to many; to Englishmen, who were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress, Borrow's pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist, dark, squalid, unintelligible. {27b} He ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... not say, than this imitation of the Florentine arti of the Middle Ages was the Working Men's College, founded in London in the fifties by that other earnest Christian Socialist, F.D. Maurice, in which Ruskin lectured gratuitously, took charge of the drawing classes, and hied off to the country with its members to sketch from nature and otherwise instruct and entertain them. Yet good in many respects came of the Guild of St. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... thirteen, and they consider the affairs of the arts pertaining to each one of them; Power, of war; Wisdom, of the sciences; Love, of food, clothing, education and breeding. The masters of all the bands, who are captains of tens, of fifties, of hundreds, also assemble, the women first and then the men. They argue about those things which are for the welfare of the state, and they choose the magistrates from among those who have already been named in the great council. In this ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... "Give me two fifties," said Hycy, "instead of this third note, and you will oblige me. By the way, here is the major." With this the other immediately complied, without the major having been in any ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... true, ran in fear to the hills when the little New Orleans went puffing down the Ohio, in 1811, would have been doubly amazed at the splendid development in the art of boat building, could they have seen the stately Sultana or Southern Belle of the fifties sweep swiftly by. After a period of gaudy ornamentation (1830-40) steamboat architecture settled down, as has that of Pullman cars today, to sane and practical lines, and the boats gained in length and strength, though they contained less ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert

... per cent in the North and West, yet large enough everywhere to keep up the traditions of a growing population. The growth continued in the next decade, despite the Civil War. It is not to be expected that it should have touched the record of the fifties, for 2,500,000 men were drawn from production for at least three years—the three years in which most of them would have grown to manhood and married, had there been no war. The South, desolated by war, and with nearly ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... these old cut-ups? Look at Steele now,—in the late fifties, but just at the mention of a name like Josie ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... Far away in the dense forests by the mountain-side you will find them, built in some little hollow by the roadside by someone who remembered his fellow-traveller. You cannot go five miles along any road without finding them. In villages they can be counted by tens, in towns by fifties. There are far more than ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... personalities as Mr. Wilson Steer, Mr. Henry Tonks, Mr. Augustus John, Mr. William Orpen, Mr. Von Glehn, Mr. MacColl, and Professor Holmes, cannot possess even such unity of purpose as inspired Mr. Holman Hunt and his associates of the 'fifties. The New English Art Club is simply an admirably administered association whose members have rather less in common than is shared by the members of an ordinary political club. The exhibitions are for this reason intensely interesting. They cannot be waved aside like mobs, and no comprehensive ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... in and out on a rude ladder. Several of these ancient yurts were very large, as shown by the ruins, being from thirty to eighty yards long and twenty to forty in width.... In these large yurts the primitive Aleuts lived by fifties and hundreds for the double object of protection and warmth." [Footnote: Harper's Magazine, vol. ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... 1850 was a land of many petty states, each more or less a law unto itself, and each, in the fifties, issuing its own separate series of postage stamps. The stamps of the Pontifical States are made familiar by their typical design of a tiara and keys, and pompous King Bomba ordered the best engraver to be found to immortalise him in a portrait ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell

... a long, long time as a memento of the days and customs gone by. It is very sad for me to think that I am the only living member of that happy company that used to spend their summer vacations there in the fifties; yet I still hope that I may visit the old Inn once more before I rejoin those choice spirits whom Mr. Longfellow has immortalized in his great poem. I am glad that some of the old residents still remember me when I was a visitor there with Dr. Parsons (the Poet), ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... approximated 3,000 inhabitants, and Hartford, as late as 1810, only 4,000. The Litchfield of the post-Revolutionary days, ranking, as a trade-centre, fourth in the state, was as familiar with Indians in her streets as the Milwaukee of the late fifties, and "out west" was no farther in miles than the Connecticut Reserve of 3,800,000 acres in Ohio which, in 1786, the state had reserved, when ceding her western lands to the new nation. Thither emigration was turning, since its check on the Susquehanna ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

... was published in the end by a personal friend, Ollivier, of Pall Mall, Kinglake paying 50 pounds to cover risk of loss; even worse terms than were obtained by Warburton two years afterwards from Colburn, who owned in the fifties to having cleared 6,000 pounds by "The Crescent and the Cross." The volume was an octavo of 418 pages; the curious folding-plate which forms the frontispiece was drawn and coloured by the author, and was compared by the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... onward through the waste, and presently on either side the way I saw other such mounds and crosses, by twos and threes, by fifties, by hundreds, in long rows beyond count. And looking around me on this dreary desolation I knew that one day (since nothing dies) upon this place of horror grass would grow and flowers bloom again; along this now desolate and deserted road people would come by the ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol

... Jost, was perhaps the best of all their soldier friends. He was straight and sturdy, a pine-tree of a man in his early fifties. He was famous in Flanders for his picked command of 110, all of them brave as he was brave, ready to be wiped out because of their heart of courage. Often the strength of his fighting group was sapped, till one could count his ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... convoy when at last the exhausted lady was helped over the stone stile that led to the churchyard. Highly picturesque was the grey structure outside, but within modernism had not done much; the chancel was feebly fitted after the ideas of the "fifties," but the faded woodwork of the nave was intact, and Magdalen still had to sit in the grim ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... Frank. "Your paper will no doubt be a curiosity to the folks at home." As he spoke, he produced the dollar, and the butternut drew out of his capacious pocket a huge roll of bills—tens, twenties, and fifties, enough to have made him independent if it had been good money—and selecting a five-dollar bill, handed it to Frank, who thrust ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon

... your Phi Beta Kappa key is a different color from your watch-chain. It's the old metal, antedating the California gold. Did your father graduate some time in the latter forties or early fifties?" ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... for many years afterwards abroad, but was at that time quite a young man, and distinguished among the Miuesovs as a man of enlightened ideas and of European culture, who had been in the capitals and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had come into contact with many of the most Liberal men of his epoch, both in Russia and abroad. He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in his declining years was very fond of describing the three days of the Paris Revolution of February 1848, hinting ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in Lamarck, but ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... the will of the latter he was to receive a legacy of seven thousand pounds. Meanwhile, Gordon appears to have made no attempt to win any of the prizes that were the common reward of pluck and industry in the Australia of the fifties. He joined the mounted police force of South Australia, but, impatient of its discipline, soon left it, and for long afterwards was content with the rough employment of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... a series of collections for a book of travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and fifties. Horace Marryat's Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the Danish Isles is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These books usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. They were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... treasure, exulting. Deep as he could plunge his arm, there was still more hiaqua below. It was strung upon elk sinews, fifty shells on a string. But he saw the noon was passed, so he prepared to depart. He loaded himself with countless strings of hiaqua, by fifties and hundreds, so that he could scarcely stagger along. Not a string did he hang on the tamanous of the elk, or the salmon, or the kamas—not one—but turned eagerly toward his long descent. At once all the otters plunged back into the lake and began to ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax

... He seems to be devoid of the sentiment of ancestor worship and sacredness of family continuity which we have been taught to associate with the Oriental. And yet there is always a current of suspicion in one's mind that he is not really revealing his inmost heart. When a bachelor in his late fifties tells us how glad he is never to have had a son, we ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... the results of mid-Victorian religion was, perhaps, the rigid enforcement of the most drastic Sabbatarianism. The horror of the tedium of Sunday infected more or less the whole of the latter portion of the week." Experto crede! He says further, dealing with the 'fifties, that "the intellectual possibilities of the English people were then stunted and cramped by the influence of the dogmatic Calvinistic theology which was the basis of its traditional sentiment;"—it is exactly the point which I am trying ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... too rich in such a temper as this and it was never more so than in the forties and the fifties of the last century. Mesmerism crossed the ocean and while Braid and later Bernheim and Charcot were following it through on sound, psychological lines and bringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific discipline, it fell here into the hands of charlatans and ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... to us by title and hearsay alone; but who shall say that his 'Speculum Principis,' or 'the Commedy Achademios callyd by name,' which he himself mentions, are lost beyond all hope of recovery? 'The Nigramansir' was actually seen by Thomas Warton, the poet-laureate, in the 'fifties of the eighteenth century, and is described by him in some detail. His account is so interesting that it ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... it a grievance that the enormous popularity of his works in America meant an enormous piracy. Towards the end of the "Fifties," Mr. Wiley of New York had begun to print cheap Ruskins; not, indeed, illegally, but without proper acknowledgment to the author, and without any reference to the author's wishes as to form and style of production. An artist and ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... name to the Secretary to be inserted in the Pledge-Book, and if she is able, one dollar. But as many workingwomen will have nothing to send but their names, we welcome these as a precious gift, and urge those who are able, to send us their fifties and hundreds, which we promise faithfully to use and account for. Where convenient, it is better that many names should be sent upon the same paper, and the smallest contributions in money can be put together and sent with them. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... in the still-unorganized county of Monterey, and all but one or two now quite lost to all human memory or thought, except as some diligent abstractor of titles or real-estate lawyer discovers something of them in the chain of title of a farm; the spires and gables of the 'fifties realized only in the towering silo, the spinning windmill, or the vine-clad porch of a substantial farm-house. But in the heyday of their new-driven corner stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and especially, how the county-seat fights raged ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick

... the Tribune in the fifties were being unconsciously molded into the men, who, a few years later, rushed to the rescue of their country's flag. The seed sown by Horace Greeley, and others like him, brought forth a rich crop of loyalty, of devotion ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd

... carefully provided for; their courses were compulsory; and their attendance at classes insured by numbers on the class-room benches which had to be duly covered. For this, the shawls that the students wore in the late fifties seem to have been popular—several students, plus shawls, were able to conceal many gaps if the monitor ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... wrinkles would not deceive such miscreants. 'Twould be a palpable fraud, our presentation."—"True," growled Shichinosuke; "but ice water runs in other veins than those who are old." Kondo[u] Noborinosuke, verging toward his fifties, now chimed in—"Naruhodo! The talk of these young chaps infects one with their own complaints. This one can but thump himself on the chest and speculate as to whether he has one lung, or two of the kind. This other limps and dreams of kakke. His tongue hangs out a yard, that he can better inspect ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new, after all."—(By an Illinois clergyman, knowing Lincoln in the 'Fifties.) ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... questions of the day that were at issue between orthodox and heretical thinkers. Brunetiere, his fervent admirer, has named him the theologian of Providence, and has shown that in all his writings this doctrine is a leading note. It is sounded in his early sermons in the fifties, and it is the theme of his most ambitious work, the Discourse on Universal History, which appeared in 1681. [Footnote; It has been shown that on one hand he controverts Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, and on the other ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... with their own chosen delights, with the proof of the divinity of science, on their sensuous lips, they cry, 'Thou hast kept the good wine until now.' Clasping on the magic robes for which they have not toiled or spun, sitting down by companies,—not of fifties,—not of hundreds,—not of thousands—sitting down by myriads, to this great feast, that the man of science spreads for them, in whose eye, the eye of a divine pity looked forth again, and saw them faint and weary still, and without a shepherd,—sitting ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... the fifties occupied themselves with materialism in Germany did not by any means escape the limitations of their doctrine. All the advances made in science served them only as new grounds of proof against the existence of the Creator, and indeed it was far beyond their trade to develop the theory any further. ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... this was calculated to increase his prestige in our eyes as a martyr to science, but he himself was longing for something else. "They have forgotten me! I'm no use to anyone!" broke from him more than once. This intensified depression took special hold of him towards the end of the fifties. Varvara Petrovna realised at last that it was a serious matter. Besides, she could not endure the idea that her friend was forgotten and useless. To distract him and at the same time to renew his fame she carried him off to Moscow, where she ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... friends is daily swelled by the additions of fifties, of hundreds, and of thousands. The cause itself seems suddenly transformed from a cold abstract theory to a living, breathing, active, and powerful chieftain, going forth "conquering and to conquer." The citadels of his great adversary are daily being stormed ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the constant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the border States as to lead to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... of his having been a New York stage-driver comes. He seems always to have had a special liking for this class of workmen. One of the house surgeons of the old New York Hospital relates that in the latter part of the fifties Whitman was a frequent visitor to that institution, looking after and ministering to disabled stage-drivers. "These drivers," says the doctor, "like those of the omnibuses in London, were a set of men by ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... are traces of the usual suburban dwellings; and here, near the river, stood the villa of the officer in command of the station. The excavation of all these buildings and many others took place in the forties and fifties of last century, and were due to the energy of Mr. John Clayton, the learned and zealous antiquary, in the possession of whose family the estate still remains. To Mr. N.G. Clayton we owe the Museum at the Lodge gate, which he built for the reception of the ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... at end of Hall—students called up in batches of half-a-dozen at a time. Very nervous work. Find, when my turn comes, that the intelligent Baboo is in the same lot! Appears to like the position. From his manner I should judge that he'd been doing nothing all his life but being examined by fifties in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various

... was at Oxford, in the fifties, with that undergraduate group which included Burne-Jones, William Morris, and on the outside, Rossetti. Where he found what so long had been hidden, even he does not say. But he wrote certain poems, in which Stroom and ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.

... feverishness. She had heard Colonel Belmont say that there was no other city in the world like it, and as she stood there and regarded the precipitous heights with their odd assortment of flimsy "palaces" and dilapidated structures dating back to the Fifties, she felt the vague restlessness that brooded over everything, and understood what he had meant; and she also knew that she understood as he had not. Above was the dazzling sky, not a fleck in its blue fire. There ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... of donkey-riding along the sands, large parties of men and girls pottering along together; the Flying Dutchman trundles hither and thither when there is breeze enough; an arch cry-man sets up his targets on the beach; the bathing-houses stand by scores and fifties along the shore, and likewise on the banks of the Ribble, a mile seaward; the hotels have their billiard-rooms; there is a theatre every evening; from morning till night comes a succession of organ-grinders, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... substantial value of first-class South American properties. But there are very few enterprises of this class still in German hands, and even their value is measured by one or two tens of millions, not by fifties or hundreds. He would be a rash man, in my judgment, who joined a syndicate to pay $500,000,000 in cash for the unsequestered remnant of Germany's overseas investments. If the Reparation Commission is to realize even this ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes

... the flanks of the square closed together, fell behind, so as to cause no disorder in the flanks, and then led on outside the flanks; 22. and whenever the sides of the square opened, they filled up the centre, if the opening was narrow, by companies; if rather wide, by fifties; if very wide, by twenty-fives;[160] so that the centre was always full. 23. If, then, it was necessary to pass any defile or bridge, they were not thrown into confusion, but the captains and companies went over in succession;[161] and if anything was ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon

... made the Gila the southern boundary, but the Gadsden Purchase placed it farther south, as now marked. A number of expeditions concerned in this and railway surveys traversed Arizona in the early fifties under Whipple, Sitgreaves, Emory, and others, and the country began to be scientifically known outside of the canyons and their surroundings. John R. Bartlett was appointed Boundary Commissioner, and he spent considerable time along the Gila and southwards and on the lower Colorado in 1852 to 1854.* ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... to its original movement by hundreds and fifties; but I had been able in the meanwhile to draw two conclusions. In the first place, Bellairs had made his last advance with a smile of gratified vanity; and I could see the creature was glorying in the kudos of an unusual position and secure ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... late fifties, was a place of birds and trees and flowers; of rude stone benches, sagging arbors smothered in vines, and cool dirt-paths bordered by sweet-smelling box. Giant magnolias filled the air with their fragrance, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... out" in the frantic forties and foolish fifties complicate the picture for their younger observers. What they are trying to find is not so much a new thrill as the reliving of an old glow—the hopefulness of their lost youth. Not content to live over in memory the high hopes that were ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various

... the Exec, a portly man in his fifties, burst out of his stateroom, still trying to shake the sleep from ...
— Decision • Frank M. Robinson

... don't exactly know (he has been dead so long) how many pictures he turned out, from first to last; but we will say, for the sake of argument, five hundred. Not five of these are offered for sale, perhaps, in the course of five years. Enlightened collectors of old pictures pour into the market by fifties, while genuine specimens of Claude, or of any other Old Master you like to mention, only dribble in by ones and twos. Under these circumstances, what is to be done? Are unoffending owners of galleries to be subjected ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins

... captains over thousands, and captains over fifties, and will set them to work his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instrument of war, and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... Of men thrice fifty fifties Would win the Ailbe Hound; In pride of war they struggled, Small cause for strife they found. Yet there came conquering Conor, And Ailill's hosts, and Ket; No law Cuchulain granted, And brooding ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... smiling and blushing, sheepishly and happily, while Mr. Brotherton was mentally calculating that he would be in his middle fifties before a possible little girl of his might be putting on her first long dresses. It saddened him a little, and he turned, rather subdued, and called into the alcove to the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... following Sunday neatly and carefully soled and heeled. It would seem strange now if on entering a church our eyes should light upon a row of farmers' dirty old boots and the freshly-mended evidences of the clerk's skill. All this took place in the fifties. In the sixties a new vicar came. The old organ wheezed its last phlegmatic tune; it was replaced by a modern instrument with six stops, and a player who did his best, but occasioned not a little laughter on account ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... will the fifty give me. When they are spent and dead, Five times other fifties shall ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling

... all should sit down by companies upon the green grass. Now there was much grass in the place. And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties. And he took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake the loaves; and he gave to the disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. And they all ate, ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong

... in rank and company, and forming the columns in due order. The Romans were a mingled fellowship. Divers outland kings, and many paynim and Saracens, were mixed with the Christian folk, for all these people owned fealty to Rome, and were in the service of the emperor. By thirties and forties, by fifties, by sixties, by hundreds and by legions, the captains apparelled the battle. In troops and in thousands the horsemen pricked to their appointed place. Multitudes of spearmen, multitudes of riders, were ranged in close order, and by hill and ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace

... good one, and I have drunk at Ledoyen's excellent champagne of the good brands and the great years at a comparatively small price. Guillemin, who was cook to the Duc de Vincennes, brought Ledoyen's into great favour in the fifties of the last century. ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard

... Thomas), as he was called by the natives, had come to Samoa in the fifties, and, after an eventful and varied experience in other portions of the group, had settled down to business in Matautu as a publican, baker and confectioner, butcher, seamen's crimp, and interpreter. You might ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke

... the utmost economy was always studied. The increase in the annual appropriations for which I asked was so small that, when I left the office in 1877, they were just about the same as they were back in the fifties, when it was first established. The necessary funds were saved by economical administration. All this was done with a feeling that, after my retirement, the satisfaction with which one could look back on such a policy would be enhanced by ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... the woods to avoid notice, and carefully counted the bills. There were two hundred-dollar bills, and three fifties, and so many of smaller denominations that Tom found the whole to amount to five hundred ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger

... great natural highway for the products and the passenger traffic of the South Central States; it had made New Orleans one of the largest and most flourishing cities in the country; and certainly the rich cotton planter of the fifties would have smiled at any suggestion that the "floating palaces" which plied this mighty stream would ever surrender their preeminence to the rusty and struggling railroads which ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... illuminated car, but they were alien, unapproachable, when they stood on an unfamiliar street-crossing snow-dimmed and silent with night. He stared at a street-sign and found that he was on Madison Avenue, up in the Fifties. As they turned east on Fifty-blankth Street he stopped under the street-light, took an envelope from his pocket, and found on it the address of that dear old friend, living on Fifty-blankth, on whom he was going to call. This ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... In the two-fifties strong barbarous Ts'in had swallowed unmanly worn-out China, and for half a century had been digesting the feast. Then—to mix my metaphors a little—China flopped up to the surface again, pale, but smiling blandly. In the sunlight she gathered strength and cohesion, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris



Words linked to "Fifties" :   maturity, decennium, time of life, decade, decennary, mid-fifties, adulthood



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