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Here in his study in Minnesota, Ignatius Donnelly, a failed politician, wrote one of the greatest best-sellers of his age, making him the founding father of the modern hunt for a real Atlantis. His ideas launched a wave of Atlantis mania that has been with us ever since. A former congressman and lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Donnelly had railed against the tycoons of big business who controlled the politics of the day, choosing to champion the cause of the common man. His idealism, unfortunately, brought only political and financial disaster.
He started a commune in Minnesota with a man called Nininger, the commune was called Nininger City, it didn't seem to work very well as an idealistic commune. And by the time it was over, there was exactly one resident there, and that was Ignatius Donnelly.
By 1880 Donnelly was out of office and down on his luck. And so he retired to his study to begin the work for which he is now most famous, a book entitled Atlantis--the Antediluvian World. Donnelly had studied Plato as a boy and the story of Atlantis had always intrigued him. With time on his hands, he decided to read everything and anything he could to find out once and for all, the truth about Atlantis. Donnelly had been galvanized in his quest to find the location of the sunken continent, by an archeological find that had thrown all preconceived ideas about the myth of the ancient world into chaos. Ten years earlier, a German businessman-turned-archeologist Heinrich Schliemann uncovered on the coast of Turkey the ruins of the city of Troy and many of the treasures from the mythical war between the Greeks and Trojans.
When Schliemann discovered Troy, it completely changed the way people looked at mythology and archeology. Before Schliemann, people had thought that what Homer had written was fiction. He made this up, there wasn't really a city of Troy. But what Schliemann did was he read Homer carefully and he figured out correctly where Troy would be located if you performed a literal translation of Homer.
It was this astonishing find that persuaded Donnelly that if Schliemann could discover Troy by carefully rereading Homer, then he too might discover Atlantis by rereading Plato. Obsessed in his quest, Donnelly tirelessly searched for Atlantis in everything around him until a thesis slowly began to emerge. Donnelly found evidence of Atlantis having existed in the similarity of plants, animals and ancient cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
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mania: n. 狂热
rail: v. 责备，漫骂
tycoon: n. 企业大亨
champion: v. 支持，拥护
idealistic: adj. 唯心主义的，空想主义的
antediluvian: adj. 大洪水之前的，上古的
intrigue: v. 激起兴趣
once and for all: adj. 坚决地，果断地
galvanize: v. 激励，刺激
preconceived ideas: n. 成见，先入为主的观点
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