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27/07/2024

LibriVox 8th Anniversary Collection

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For the past few years we have celebrated the anniversary of LibriVox with a collection loosely themed on the number of the anniversary year. This year is no exception.Readers have contributed 88 recordings in Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Polish and Yiddish, and this feast of fiction, poetry, essays, articles and musical items ranges from lectures to love letters, science to songs, travel to taxes, and politics to pirates, spiced with a dash of humour.It has, as always, been enormous fun for the readers and singers, and we hope that you, the listener, will gain just as much enjoyment as we have had producing it. (Introduction by Ruth Golding) Some additional notes: Section 5, Extract from The Eight-oared Victors, Chapter 35, was written by Howard Garis under his pseudonym Lester Chadwick. Section 37, Love Letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn by Henry VIII also includes letters to Henry from Anne Boleyn (1501-1536). Section 53, Letters I to VIII of Political and Social Letters of a Lady of the 18th Century was edited by Emily Fanny Dorothy Osborn McDonnell (1851-1925). Section 54 Eight Little Letters Make Three Little Words: Words by Bert Kalmar (1884-1947); Music by Ted Snyder (1881-1965). Section 55, Koenig Heinrich der Achte – Prologue was translated into the German by Wolf Graf Baudissin (1789-1878). Section 65, The Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup was translated into English by Shigeyoshi Obata. Section 77, In The Year 2889 was jointly written by Jules Verne (1828-1905) and Michel Verne (1861-1925). […]

25/07/2024

Address to Free Colored Americans

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The first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in New York City in May, 1837. Members at the Convention came from all walks of life and included such prominent women as Mary Parker, Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, and Lydia Maria Child. One outcome of this important event was a statement of the organization’s role in the abolitionist movement as expressed in AN ADDRESS TO FREE COLORED AMERICANS, which begins: “The sympathy we feel for our oppressed fellow-citizens who are enslaved in these United States, has called us together, to devise by mutual conference the best means for bringing our guilty country to a sense of her transgressions; and to implore the God of the oppressed to guide and bless our labors on behalf of our “countrymen in chains.” This significant event was a precursor to the growing women’s rights movement of the time and to greater female involvement in other political reform movements.     [chương_files]  

24/07/2024

Essays on Work and Culture

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The author investigates the world of work against a backdrop of culture. Each of the 25 essays focuses on one aspect of the topic. For example, the first essay, “Tool or Man?” looks at two views of man. One is that of strength as the provider of security. The other is that of aesthete, as an enthusiast of the arts or academics or religion. In our culture, provider of security is the winner every time. Man as a source of multiple talents cannot be allowed. As the author frames the argument, “Specialisation has been carried so far that it has become an organised tyranny.” The author promotes the idea of a world in which we view the total man, not just the provider of security. In succeeding essays the author deals with growth from youth to maturity, the role of education, and man’s search for freedom.     [chương_files]  

23/07/2024

A Problem in Modern Ethics

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“Society lies under the spell of ancient terrorism and coagulated errors. Science is either wilfully hypocritical or radically misinformed.” John Addington Symonds struck many an heroic note in this courageous (albeit anonymously circulated) essay. He is a worthy Virgil guiding the reader through the Inferno of suffering which emerging medico-legal definitions of the sexually deviant were prepared to inflict on his century and on the one which followed. Symonds pleads for sane human values in a world of Urnings, Dionings, Urano-Dionings and Uraniasters – in short, the whole paraphernalia of Victorian taxonomies and undigested Darwinism which, superimposed on the “terrorism” of religion, labelled and to some extent created the specimen “homosexual.” A discussion of the “manly love” poems of Walt Whitman leads the author to speculate on a better future for the criminalised mutual passions of men; yet he is obliged to defer the dream, for “the world cannot be invited to entertain it.” (Introduction by Martin Geeson)     [chương_files]  

23/07/2024

Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases

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Thoroughly appalled and sickened by the rising numbers of white-on-black murders in the South since the beginning of Reconstruction, and by the unwillingness of local, state and federal governments to prosecute those who were responsible, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett wrote Southern Horrors, a pamphlet in which she exposed the horrible reality of lynchings to the rest of the nation and to the world. Wells explained, through case study, how the federal government’s failure to intervene allowed Southern states the latitude to slowly but effectively disenfranchise blacks from participating as free men and women in a post-Civil War America with the rights and opportunities guaranteed to all Americans by the Constitution.     [chương_files]  

23/07/2024

Five Lectures on Blindness

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The [five] lectures were written primarily to be delivered at the summer sessions of the University of California, at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, in the summer of 1918. . . they are the outgrowth of almost a quarter of a century spent in work for the blind, and were written from the standpoint of a blind person, seeking to better the condition of the blind. They were addressed not to the blind, but to the seeing public, for the benefit that will accrue to the blind from a better understanding of their problems. (Extract from the Forward by Milton J. Ferguson)     [chương_files]  

20/07/2024
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Mathematical Problems

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Lecture delivered before the International Congress of Mathematicians at Paris in 1900 and subsequently published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society Vol. 8 (1902), 479-481.     [chương_files]  

19/07/2024
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On the Elementary Electrical Charge

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The experiments herewith reported were undertaken with the view of introducing certain improvements into the oil-drop method of determining e and N and thus obtaining a higher accuracy than had before been possible in the evaluation of these most fundamental constants. From the Physical Review, Vol. II, No. 2     [chương_files]  

19/07/2024
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On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery

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Joseph Lister was born near London in 1827. He studied medicine at the University of London and pursued a career as a surgeon in Scotland. He became professor of Surgery in Glasgow and later (1877) at Kings College Hospital, in London. Lister’s contribution to the advancement of surgery cannot be overestimated. Before his work on antisepsis, wounds were often left open to heal, leading to long recoveries, unsightly scarring, and not infrequently amputation or death due to infection. Lister’s work enabled more wounds to be closed primarily with sutures, drastically reducing healing time, scarring, amputations, and deaths due to infection. Lister retired in 1896 but was called back to assist in the operation on King Edward VII for appendicitis just days before the King’s coronation. The King later credited Lister for his survival and quick recovery. Lister died in 1912.     [chương_files]  

17/07/2024
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Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives

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This is a concise yet thorough explanation of what might happen to our world in the aftermath of a nuclear war. The myriad of potential effects will be global and wide-spread, and the potentials are glazed over in this short work.     [chương_files]