This LL Study Guide moves from Airport (the 1970 ensemble disaster film that helped launch the decade’s big-budget disaster cycle) through Hokusai’s sketchbook Manga, the French Revolutionary month Thermidor, and 19th-century Cincinnati’s meatpacking boom, to witch hazel in Native American medicine and Queen Victoria’s trend‑setting white wedding dress and Prince Albert’s typhoid‑attributed death. Airport’s box‑office success and 10 Oscar nominations made it a template for 1970s disaster movies. Hokusai’s 15-volume Hokusai Manga popularized the word manga, now used worldwide for Japanese comics. Thermidor, named from a Greek root for “heat,” was the 11th month of the French Republican calendar, roughly mid‑July to mid‑August, and later gave its name to both the Thermidorian Reaction and Lobster Thermidor. Cincinnati’s 19th‑century role as a pork‑packing hub earned it the nickname “Porkopolis,” while German immigrants contributed sausages like goetta and the city’s famous chili, which is actually a beef‑based Mediterranean‑spiced meat sauce. Witch hazel’s bark and leaves, long used by Native Americans as an astringent decoction for swellings and skin problems, became a staple of modern over‑the‑counter skin and hemorrhoid remedies; its name comes from Old English wice (“pliant, bendable”), not sorcery. Finally, Queen Victoria’s highly publicized 1840 marriage to Prince Albert in a white satin and Honiton lace gown popularized the white wedding dress in the West; Albert’s death in December 1861 was contemporaneously attributed to typhoid fever.
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