They closed in late 1998, for $345,000, and since then have been slowly and lovingly removing the vestiges of the previous half-century.

Reasons for this can be found in the pattern of settlement across the province over the previous half-century.

Nobody is suggesting that the previous half-century in the state was an unblemished stretch of probity, but nobody can remember anything remotely like this.

In the previous half-century it could not have been more than a million and a half in all.

Certainly the number must be negligible compared to the dozens or hundreds of works passed on from the previous half-century.

And since the movie was released last September, the Wards' friends say, they have surely talked more than in the previous half-century.

In 1940, Walter Lippmann wrote that during the previous half-century, educators had ceased teaching the "Western culture which produced the modern democratic state."

Education for girls was still limited, but the English Enlightenment of the previous half-century had begun to push those boundaries.

Between 1947 and 1960, the average real income for American workers increased by as much as it had in the previous half-century.

The new musicology rejected the formal analysis and detached scholarship that had dominated the field in the previous half-century.