A big notion held the day: the district's enrollment was declining and the decline would not reverse itself in the foreseeable future.
But Murphy's big notion that Victoria, "a canny politician", triumphed over her attackers by manipulating popular sympathies, revived admiration of the royal family and thereby created "the stable, modern monarchy that endures to this day" is flimsy stuff.
The 50's and 60's were the great age of the Big Notion: the pseudoscientific book that explained us to ourselves and told us where we were headed, which in most cases was nowhere good.
America has successfully tied all these pockets of independence struggles, revolutions and extremists into one big notion of terrorism".
Immigration is what the pundits call a substantive issue, the type that merits big-notion editorials and multiple pages in political platforms.
But what this coming-of-age story really deals with are big notions of responsibility, consequence, love and the idea that there are no fundamentally right decisions, just one's that we can live with.
You can see flickerings of the genre in more recent works like Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" or David Brooks's "Bobos in Paradise," which is partly an ironic gloss on Riesman, but Charles A. Reich's "Greening of America," which came out in 1970 and said that we were all becoming hippies, pretty much ended the vogue for Big Notions.
I'm not sure that the story is the right receptacle for big notions about imperialism, racism, militarism, the balance of power, religiosity, the end of reason; it is a bit like loading the history of philosophy into an egg-and-spoon race.
Based on the old-fashioned concept of the Almanac, The Know claims to be inclusive, made for anyone looking for "strong editorial content, beautiful imagery and big notions".
Has the big-risk-big-reward notion of entrepreneurial capitalism ever worn a happier face?
