![]() ![]() Learned people like Alexander Graham Bell, who served as the second president of the NGS, understood the growing value of geographic awareness, and promoted it. It is certainly no coincidence that the society sprang up just a few years after the Berlin Conference, at which the territories of Africa were carved up by the European colonial powers. The National Geographic Society (the same group that created the magazine) was founded in 1888, with a focus on spreading knowledge about geography and encouraging resource conservation. But during the eras of exploration and colonialism, geography was gradually added to the mix. Long before social studies and economics, a smart student was one who was familiar with Pyxis and Perseus, about the parallel postulate and Thales' theorem. From the Renaissance onward, the Quadrivium was the key to understanding more or less everything. Geography was an informal 19th-century addition to the Quadrivium, an educational system comprised of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Of course, it isn't only geopolitics that explains clues like these. ![]() Knowing geography was not just about intelligence, but a civic duty. A solver today might yawn at these arcane references, but just imagine how often the names of Soviet and European cities were in the newspaper in the decades after World War II. Thus, in just one week in early March of 1984, solvers were treated to clues about geographic obscurities like: The emphasis on geography in crosswords was in part a way to practice and affirm such knowledge. Being an in-the-know "citizen of the world" meant understanding more than a little about the places where U.S. Both WWII and the Cold War placed heavy emphasis on foreign affairs in the newspaper, in a way that for many Americans felt both personal and urgent. So maybe it's no surprise that world capitals and foreign currencies populated so many crossword clues in the middle of the 20th century. It has been said that war is "geography's best friend," and indeed with global conflict came increased awareness about international places. Farrar was by all accounts a talented, supportive editor, and many of the ground rules she created for crosswords persist to this day.įarrar's appointment in early 1942 came closely on the heels of the United States' entry into World War II. (The feature went daily in 1950.) Not only that, but the editor the paper hired, Margaret Farrar, turned out to be an excellent choice for the advancement of the crossword puzzle. Though crosswords had existed and been popular since 1913, the New York Times made the trend an acceptable pastime for the intellectual set in 1942, when it began publishing its own puzzle in-house. But meanwhile, old assumptions have given way to new ones. Today, this body of knowledge strikes many of us as stuffy and esoteric. But more often than not, older puzzles assumed that educated people had a shared awareness of Victorian novels, classical languages, and systems of natural classification, to name a few subjects. It's not that older puzzles never made reference to pop culture, or that modern puzzles never have clues about minor poets or biological genera. ![]() From the 1940s to the early 1990s (the period at the New York Times that has been termed the " pre-Shortzian era") solvers had to be up on their geography, botany, poetry, Latin, and Shakespeare to successfully solve a puzzle, while a solver today might be better off studying, the Internet Meme database, and Pitchfork. In a lively new book entitled The Curious History of the Crossword, Ben Tausig, himself a noted constructor and editor of crosswords, argues that the day Will Shortz took over the New York Times crossword 20 years ago marked a watershed moment in the puzzle's history.Įvery era of the crossword puzzle tells us something about the value of knowledge in the world at that time. But the crossword has come a long way since Arthur Wynne's first creation for The New York World. 21, 2013 marks the hundredth anniversary of the crossword puzzle.
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