English Recordings

One day in 1848 a carpenter named Marshall, who worked in a saw mill in California, made a remarkable discovery. He noticed some bright yellow particles in the water and he took them to his partner, a Mr Sutter. Sutter was a Swiss who had come to America some years earlier to make a fortune for himself. He had been given permission to found a settlement in the Sacramento Valley and his determination and energy had made him rich.
Sutter and Marshall agreed to keep their find secret, but it was too late. It was not long before the news reached San Francisco. Gold fever hit the town like some terrible disease. Soldiers deserted the army, sailors left their ships, workman gave up their jobs – all to rush to the Sacramento Valley. The 1849. Gold Rush had begun.
The following autumn, people started arriving from the eastern states. The way overland was long, a difficult, over unfriendly country, high mountains, and dry deserts. There were some who were prepared to cross the terrible desert of Dead Valley in order to reach the gold a few days before the rest.
Some were lucky and found gold. They did not always live long enough to sell it – they were in the Wild West.
Many of the Forty – Niners – the men of the 1849 Gold Rush – found so little than they were never able to go back to the east. It was a hard life, and it produced hard men.
The Gold Rush was a disaster for Sutter himself. The prospectors did the great deal of damage on his land, and killed one of his sons and at the end of his life he was a poor man who stopped people in the street to tell them that Gold is the Devil.

The climate of the British isles is neither too hot nor too cold. British winters are mild and summers are cool because the winds that blow from the Atlantic Ocean are mild in winter and cool in summer. But, of course, in different parts of the country the climate varies.
It is sometimes said that mountains make their own weather. Though the mountains in Great Britain – Cheviot Hills, The Pennines, and The Welsh mountains are not very high, they influence the climate of the country. Thus it rains more often in the western half where mountains lie near the west coast. The eastern part that is on the other side of the mountains and farther from the Ocean is the driest.
In fact the climate of Great Britain is so changeable that Britain is said to have no climate but only weather. Perhaps this is why English people so often talk about the weather. You can often hear them say: What’s the weather like today? Is it warm or cold? Is it wet or dry, cloudy, sunny, windy or fine?
The weather in Great Britain cannot be forecast with certainty even for 24 hours. Nevertheless we may say that June is one of the driest and sunniest month, July and August are the warmest and yet the wettest summer months. It is warm and dry in September and October, foggy in November, and stormy in December. It often snows in January which is the coldest month. In southern parts, however, the snow melts as it falls or soon after.
It is interesting to remember that English people learned some kinds of sport from other nations: skating and skiing. For these sports British mild winters are seldom suitable, so they have to construct artificial ice-rings or go abroad. On the other hand, the climate of the British isles is suitable for such kinds of sports as horse-racing, dog-racing, rowing, motor-racing, football, tennis, cricket, and golf, which are very popular ther

But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.
Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.
African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.
Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.
So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”
About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.
In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.
Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.
Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.
For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.
There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.
While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

1.A: Surprised you, didn't I?
Happy Birthday to you!!!
B: Wow, thanks. You shouldn't have.
2.A: They're out of coffee.
Have something else.
B: Um, Never mind, then!
3 A: Hey, check it out!
I got an E-mail from Deutschland.
B: Wow, really? Neat.
4.A:I have been staying up all night
for the past couple of days.
B: No wonder you look so tired.
Take it easy.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Today, I'd like to introduce where I live.

I've lived in Austin, Texas since 2007. After getting married, I moved this city because of my husband, who has lived there for 10 years and has been working since he graduated from school in the US. My first impression of this city is that the sky is blue and I can see it easily because the buildings are less than 2 stories except those in the downtown area.

Austin is famous for The Texas Capitol, The University of Texas at Austin(UT), and country music. Many people mistakenly believe that the capital of Texas is other city like Houston or Dallas. The reason may be that Austin is smaller than Houston and Dallas. UT is the third largest university in the States based on the number of the students, also famous for its sports teams. There are many young people and foreign students, so the air of the city is brisk and lively, furthermore the crime rate is low. In the city, country music is so popular you can listen to it at the number of concerts near downtown on weekends. Thanks to these 3 reasons, many people visit the city all the time.

Although Austin is notorious for its hot summers, I love this city because of its educational environment, low crime rate, and active economy.

Let me give you a brief geographical background.

Let me tell you something about our present location.

I'd like to take a few minutes to familiarize you with the area.

Soon we'll be entering.

We are now standing in...

We are now in...

I'll tell you more about it in a moment.

Before talking about it...

I'd like to point out...

In front of you is...

On your right...

On your left...

Off to the north...

Off to the east...

Off to the south...

Off to the west...

On the top of...

In the distance...

Up ahead.

We are now reaching...

You may have noticed...

Round the corner...

A few blocks away.

For those who want to know more about it...

Let's go and have a closer look.

Not long ago Bob Geldof was just a rock musician. His group, The Boomtown Rats, was not doing well, but then he assembled forty rock stars to record a song to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time” immediately became the fastest – selling single in British pop history and raised 8 million pounds. Two very successful Live Aid concerts were organized soon after this and raised new 50 million pound. In fact, by the end of 1985 people everywhere were pressing money into Geldof’s hand and he was hailed as a saint by some newspapers. In 1986 he was nominated for Noble Peace Prize.
During 1985 this 6ft-3in-tall thin singer did much to make famine in Africa a cause which no government, or civilized man or woman, could ignore. The Live Aid concerts have in turn been followed by similar events, including Fashion Aid in London and Sport Aid in many towns all over the world.
Geldof has persistently refused to take a salary from the organization he has created. He admits that he is “flat broke”, but says simply: “I’ve told everyone that every penny goes to Africa, so it’s matter of trust.” His message has remained the same everywhere: “We’ve kept millions alive, now we must give them a life – and that needs money.”

In this extract from “The Red Badge of Courage”, Henry Fleming a new recruit to the Union army, speaks of the doubts and fears that troubled him – just as they have troubled most new recruits in every country since war began.

The division began to move away from the field, and went off in the direction of the river. When Henry noticed this, he breathed a sigh of satisfaction. “Well, it’s all over,” he said to Wilson.
Henry thought about events on the battlefield. He had been in a world of shot and shell fire, and at last he had come out of it. He had seen blood and passion, and he had escaped death. As the thought of his deeds, failures and achievements, he decided he had not done badly on the whole.
Henry was thinking of some deeds in action with pleasure and pride. He remembered the lieutenant’s words that gave him such a thrill. “If I had ten thousand wild cats like you, I could finish off this war in less than a week.” Henry would never forget this.
Nevertheless, there was the fact of his running away from that first battle. That still made him feel a sense of shame. Many of his fellows had run to – that was natural – but that was not excuse.
But yet at the back of his mind, the knowledge that he had desert the tattered soldier remained. It was an error that would remain with him all his life. And if he lived to be a hundred, he would still remember the look in the man’s eyes.
Ahead of him were peaceful skies, fresh meadows and cool brooks. Over the river a golden ray of sunshine came through the gray of the rainy clouds.