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Few albums of the 1970s capture the era’s wailing, pristinely produced rock sound as crisply as Boston’s 1976 self-titled debut–an LP largely defined by the soaring lead vocals and overdubbed harmonies of Brad Delp. With its string of hits (More Than a Feeling, Let Me Take You Home Tonight), the LP sold 17 million copies and started the versatile, philanthropic singer on a career with the band that lasted until his death. He was 55.
After witnessing the murder of her family and villagers by Salvadoran soldiers in 1981, Rufina Amaya, sole survivor of the El Mozote massacre, might have withered. Instead, in defiance of the governments of the U.S. and El Salvador, which denied the atrocity, she supplied graphic details to anyone who would listen. Her accounts prompted front-page stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times and ramped up congressional debate over U.S. aid to El Salvador. In the end, the U.S. continued to support its ally, which in the ’90s passed a law exempting the army from prosecution. But Amaya, who returned to her country as a lay pastor in ’90, had changed the way the story would be told. She was 64.
Historian Winthrop Jordan’s landmark 1968 book, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, was not intended to critique modern race relations. But its layered research–which showed an absence of racism when whites and blacks first encountered each other as equals–proved that discrimination was not an ingrained American trait but a cruel and unusual choice. He was 75.
For a brainy postmodernist whose 50 books had titles like Forget Foucault and Simulacra and Simulation, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard attracted a lot of attention. A fierce critic of consumerism, he touted the notion of “hyperreality”–the unreal experiencing of events not through one’s senses but through the media. His theories drew a cultlike fan base, which included the creators of The Matrix films, but he was best known for sparking furors with his provocative, if not entirely serious, commentary–most famously his 1991 remark that the much covered first Gulf War “did not take place.” He was 77.
In 1950 TIME wrote that she possessed a curious “bellicose zeal and tomboyish winsomeness.” Offscreen, blond bombshell Betty Hutton struggled with an addiction to pills and four failed marriages. Onscreen she lent a brash, explosive energy to such films of the ’40s and ’50s as Annie Get Your Gun and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. After walking away from Paramount–and her film career–in a 1952 dispute, Hutton acknowledged she could be, well, temperamental. “When I’m working with jerks with no talent, I raise hell until I get what I want,” she said. She was 86.
If not for parking-garage tycoon Joe Diamond, you might still be looking for a spot. In the 1940s, faced with a postwar shortage of parking-lot attendants, he set up self-pay boxes to collect fees. His tactics, like attaching 50-gal. drums to the tires of unpaid vehicles, irked customers, but his idea caught on, helping make self-pay systems standard in lots across the country. He was 99.
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It could have been a plot from Revenge of the Nerds. In December the Delta Zeta sorority, struggling to combat its bookish reputation, booted 23 students from its DePauw University chapter, saying the sisters were neglecting their recruiting duties. The 23 young women, who insisted that they were shown the door because they were not pretty enough, scored a plus-size payback when DePauw President Robert Bottoms decided that, come September, it would be the Delta Zetas who would no longer be welcome on campus. Of the expulsion, Bottoms said, “We believe the values of our university and those of Delta Zeta … are incompatible.”
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