GLOSSARY:
historical site: 歷史古蹟
dark house: 黑馬 (unexpected)
spring field: 原名泉水鎮, 後來改為春田鎮
tweaking - highlight
wonder - amazing me
odd - strange/pecelier 奇特的, 古怪的
whooping, hooting, howling
wailing, groaning, growing 4
Lincoln: A Photobiography (Houghton Mifflin social studies) by
https://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Photobiography-Houghton-Mifflin-studies/dp/0395518482
Abraham Lincoln stood out in a crowd as much for his wit and rollicking humor as for his height. This Newbery Medal-winning biography of our Civil War president is warm, appealing, and illustrated with dozens of carefully chosen photographs and prints.
Russell Freedman begins with a lively account of Abraham Lincoln's boyhood, his career as a country lawyer, and his courtship and marriage to Mary Todd. Then the author focuses on the presidential years (1861 to 1865), skillfullly explaining the many complex issues Lincoln grappled with as he led a deeply divided nation through the Civil War. The book's final chapter is a moving account of that tragic evening in Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. Concludes with a sampling of Lincoln writings and a detailed list of Lincoln historical sites.
This title has been selected as a Common Core Text Exemplar (Grades 2-3, Read Aloud Informational Text).
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
National Treasure: Book of Secrets (released on home video as National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets) is a 2007 mystery adventure film directed by Jon Turteltaub and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. It is a sequel to the 2004 film National Treasure and is the second part of the National Treasure franchise. The film stars Nicolas Cage, Diane Kruger, Justin Bartha, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Ed Harris, Bruce Greenwood, and Helen Mirren.
Plot[edit]
Five days after the end of the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth and Michael O'Laughlen, both members of the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), enter a tavern and approach Thomas Gates to decode a message. Thomas recognizes the message as using the Playfair cipher and begins to translate it. While he does so, Booth leaves for Ford's Theatre to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. Thomas solves the puzzle and realizes the men are still loyal to the Confederacy. A fight breaks out, and Thomas rips several pages from the diary and throws them in the fireplace. Thomas is shot, and the gunman retrieves only a page fragment.
Over 140 years later, Ben Gates is telling his great-great-grandfather's story at a Civilian Heroes conference. Black market antiquities dealer, Mitch Wilkinson, shows one of the 18 missing pages of John Wilkes Booth's diary, with Thomas Gates' name written on it, convincing everyone that Thomas was not only a conspirator, but the grand architect of the Lincoln assassination. Ben sets out to prove the innocence of Thomas.
Using spectral imaging, Ben, his estranged girlfriend Abigail Chase, and friend Riley Poole discover a cipher pointing to Édouard Laboulaye, hidden on the back of the diary page. Ben and Riley travel to Paris, where they find a clue engraved on the torch of the scale model of the Statue of Liberty, referring to the two Resolute desks.
Ben and Riley then head to London to look at the desk at Buckingham Palace and Abigail shows up, unannounced. From the Queen's desk, he obtains an ancient wooden plank. Meanwhile, Wilkinson broke into Patrick Gates' house and cloned Patrick's cell phone, in order to track Ben's whereabouts. Wilkinson eventually obtains the wooden plank, but not before Ben manages to photograph the symbols carved into the plank.
At Ben's insistence, Patrick reluctantly asks his ex-wife and Ben's mother, Dr. Emily Appleton, for help in translating the symbols. She does so, but points out that some of the glyphs are partial, leading Ben to conclude that another plank must be hidden in the other Resolute desk, located in the Oval Office.
Ben and Abigail coax Abigail's new love interest, Connor, a curator for the White House, into letting them into the office to see the desk. Ben discovers that the second plank is missing, but he does find a stamp bearing the seal of the "President's Secret Book". Riley tells Ben that the Book of Secrets contains documents collected "by Presidents, for Presidents' eyes only", covering such controversial subjects as the JFK assassination, Watergate, and Area 51.
Ben crashes the President's birthday party at Mount Vernon to convince the President to follow him into a secret tunnel under the House, where he confronts him about the book. The President sympathetically warns Ben that his actions will be interpreted as an attempt to kidnap the President and Ben is now wanted for committing a federal offense. Ben convinces the President to reveal the location of the book, which is at the Library of Congress.
In the book, Ben finds a picture of the missing plank from the desk and an entry by President Coolidge, who found the plank in 1924, had it destroyed, and commissioned Gutzon Borglum to carve Mount Rushmore to erase the map's landmarks in order to protect the treasure. However, FBI Agent Sadusky tracks Ben to the Library and the three narrowly escape capture.
Ben, Riley, Abigail, and Patrick then head to Mount Rushmore, where they meet Mitch, who has kidnapped Ben's mother, Emily. Mitch helps them find the entrance of a cave, containing the legendary Native American city of gold, Cíbola. Once inside, they encounter several traps and everyone gets separated. Eventually, they find the city of solid gold underneath Mount Rushmore and it begins flooding with water. In order to get out alive, one person has to stay behind to hold open the door to the tunnel. After a struggle and Ben's attempt to sacrifice himself, Mitch ends up staying behind and asking Ben to give him the credit for finding the treasure.
Ben clears his family's name with the discovery and is cleared of all charges when the President tells everyone that Ben saved his life. Ben also ensures Mitch receives joint credit for the find. At the very end, the President mentions the favor he asked of Ben when he gave him the location of the Book; implying that a 3rd movie would be forthcoming.
So You Want to Be President?
Hilariously illustrated by Small, this celebration by St. George shows us the foibles, quirks and humanity of forty-two men who have risen to one of the most powerful positions in the world. Perfect for this election year--and every year!
Elvis Presley
Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, as a twinless twin—his brother was stillborn. When he was 13 years old, he and his family relocated to Memphis, Tennessee. His music career began there in 1954, when he recorded a song with producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was an early popularizer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who managed the singer for more than two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States. He was regarded as the leading figure of rock and roll after a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines that coincided with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, made him enormously popular—and controversial.Elvis Aaron Presley[a] (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, he is often referred to as "the King of Rock and Roll", or simply, "the King".
In November 1956, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender. In 1958, he was drafted into military service. He resumed his recording career two years later, producing some of his most commercially successful work before devoting much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and their accompanying soundtrack albums, most of which were critically derided. In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed televised comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours. In 1973, Presley was featured in the first globally broadcast concert via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii. Several years of prescription drug abuse severely damaged his health, and he died in 1977 at the age of 42.
Presley is one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of the 20th century. Commercially successful in many genres, including pop, blues and gospel, he is the best-selling solo artist in the history of recorded music,[5][6][7][8][excessive citations] with estimated record sales of around 600 million units worldwide.[9] He won three Grammys, also receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame.
Artistry
Influences
Presley's earliest musical influence came from gospel. His mother recalled that from the age of two, at the Assembly of God church in Tupelo attended by the family, "he would slide down off my lap, run into the aisle and scramble up to the platform. There he would stand looking at the choir and trying to sing with them."[329] In Memphis, Presley frequently attended all-night gospel singings at the Ellis Auditorium, where groups such as the Statesmen Quartet led the music in a style that, Guralnick suggests, sowed the seeds of Presley's future stage act:
As a teenager, Presley's musical interests were wide-ranging, and he was deeply informed about African American musical idioms as well as white ones (see "Teenage life in Memphis"). Though he never had any formal training, he was blessed with a remarkable memory, and his musical knowledge was already considerable by the time he made his first professional recordings in 1954 at the age of 19. When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller met him two years later, they were astonished at his encyclopedic understanding of the blues.[331] At a press conference the following year, he proudly declared, "I know practically every religious song that's ever been written."[149]
Musical style and genres
Presley was a central figure in the development of rockabilly, according to music historians. Katherine Charlton even calls him "rockabilly's originator",[332] though Carl Perkins has explicitly stated that "[Sam] Phillips, Elvis, and I didn't create rockabilly."[333] and, according to Michael Campbell, "Bill Haley recorded the first big rockabilly hit."[334] "It had been there for quite a while", says Scotty Moore. "Carl Perkins was doing basically the same sort of thing up around Jackson, and I know for a fact Jerry Lee Lewis had been playing that kind of music ever since he was ten years old."[335] However, "Rockabilly crystallized into a recognizable style in 1954 with Elvis Presley's first release, on the Sun label", writes Craig Morrison.[336] Paul Friedlander describes the defining elements of rockabilly, which he similarly characterizes as "essentially ... an Elvis Presley construction": "the raw, emotive, and slurred vocal style and emphasis on rhythmic feeling [of] the blues with the string band and strummed rhythm guitar [of] country".[337] In "That's All Right", the Presley trio's first record, Scotty Moore's guitar solo, "a combination of Merle Travis–style country finger-picking, double-stop slides from acoustic boogie, and blues-based bent-note, single-string work, is a microcosm of this fusion."[337]
At RCA, Presley's rock and roll sound grew distinct from rockabilly with group chorus vocals, more heavily amplified electric guitars[338] and a tougher, more intense manner.[339] While he was known for taking songs from various sources and giving them a rockabilly/rock and roll treatment, he also recorded songs in other genres from early in his career, from the pop standard "Blue Moon" at Sun to the country ballad "How's the World Treating You?" on his second LP to the blues of "Santa Claus Is Back In Town". In 1957, his first gospel record was released, the four-song EP Peace in the Valley. Certified as a million seller, it became the top-selling gospel EP in recording history.[340] Presley would record gospel periodically for the rest of his life.
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From How Great Thou Art (1967), a traditional song popular in the black gospel tradition. The arrangement evokes "the percussive style of the 1930s Golden Gate Quartet."[341][342]
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After his return from military service in 1960, Presley continued to perform rock and roll, but the characteristic style was substantially toned down. The reason why the music from this period lacks the drama from his Fifties recordings, critic Dave Marsh writes, is "because what we're hearing is not genius discovering itself but the sound of genius at work."[343] His first post-Army single, the number one hit "Stuck on You", is typical of this shift. RCA publicity materials referred to its "mild rock beat"; discographer Ernst Jorgensen calls it "upbeat pop".[344] The modern blues/R&B sound captured so successfully on Elvis Is Back! was essentially abandoned for six years until such 1966–67 recordings as "Down in the Alley" and "Hi-Heel Sneakers",[345] though Marsh holds that while he may have recorded few blues songs in the early to middle Sixties, "blues informs almost everything here."[343] The singer's output during most of the 1960s emphasized pop music, often in the form of ballads such as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", a number one in 1960. While that was a dramatic number, most of what Presley recorded for his film soundtracks was in a much lighter vein.[346] Notable numbers in other genres are the No. 1 hits "It's Now or Never" of 1960, based on the Italian aria "O Sole Mio" and concluding with a "full-voiced operatic cadence," [347] and the 1962 hit "She's Not You" which "integrates the Jordanaires so completely, it's practically doo-wop."[343]
While Presley performed several of his classic ballads for the '68 Comeback Special, the sound of the show was dominated by aggressive rock and roll. He would record few new straight-ahead rock and roll songs thereafter; as he explained, they were "hard to find".[348] A significant exception was "Burning Love", his last major hit on the pop charts. Like his work of the 1950s, Presley's subsequent recordings reworked pop and country songs, but in markedly different permutations. His stylistic range now began to embrace a more contemporary rock sound as well as soul and funk. Much of Elvis In Memphis, as well as "Suspicious Minds", cut at the same sessions, reflected his new rock and soul fusion. In the mid-1970s, many of his singles found a home on country radio, the field where he first became a star.[349]
Vocal style and range
The general development of Presley's voice is described by critic Dave Marsh as "A voice, high and thrilled in the early days, lower and perplexed in the final months."[350] Marsh credits Presley with the introduction of the "vocal stutter" on 1955's "Baby Let's Play House."[351] When on "Don't Be Cruel" Presley "slides into a 'mmmmm' that marks the transition between the first two verses," he shows "how masterful his relaxed style really is."[352] Marsh describes the singing on "Can't Help Falling in Love" to be of "gentle insistence and delicacy of phrasing," with the line "'Shall I stay'" pronounced as if the words are fragile as crystal."[353] On the operatic "It's Now or Never" Presley "was reaching for something more than he had ever attempted before,"[347] and, according to discographer Jorgensen, later the same year the melody to "Surrender", a number also based on an Italian original, "Torna A Sorrento", "required an even greater demonstration of vocal powers."[354]
Jorgensen calls the 1966 recording of "How Great Thou Art" "an extraordinary fulfillment of his vocal ambitions," as Presley had "crafted for himself an ad-hoc arrangement in which he took every part of the four-part vocal, from [the] bass intro to the soaring heights of the song's operatic climax," in the process becoming "a kind of one-man quartet."[355] Guralnick finds "Stand By Me" from the same sessions "a beautifully articulated, almost nakedly yearning performance," but, by contrast, feels that Presley reaches beyond his powers on "Where No One Stands Alone" on which "he was reduced to a kind of inelegant bellowing to push out a sound" that Jake Hess would have no problem with. Hess himself thought that while others may have a voice as great or greater than Presley's, "he had that certain something that everyone searches for all during their lifetime."[356] Guralnick attempts to pinpoint that something: "The warmth of his voice, his controlled use of both vibrato technique and natural falsetto range, the subtlety and deeply felt conviction of his singing were all qualities recognizably belonging to his talent but just as recognizably not to be achieved without sustained dedication and effort."[357]
Presley's singing to his own "necessarily limited, both rhythmically and melodically," piano accompaniment, such as can be heard on the 1967 recording of "You'll Never Walk Alone", for Guralnick are always special occasions, because "it was always a measure of his engagement when he sat down at the keyboard to play."[358]Describing his piano technique as "staccato style,"[359] Jorgensen finds that on "Without Love" from the 1969 sessions, "his gospel-flavored treatment took it to a level of spirituality rarely matched in his career."[360] Presley also played the instrument on the "impassioned version" of the sessions's next song, "I'll Hold You in My Heart," of which Guralnick writes that "there is something magical about the moment that only the most inspired singing can bring about, as Elvis loses himself in the music, words no longer lend themselves to literal translation, and singer and listener both are left emotionally wrung out by the time the song finally limps to an end."[361]
Marsh praises his 1968 reading of "U.S. Male", "bearing down on the hard guy lyrics, not sending them up or overplaying them but tossing them around with that astonishingly tough yet gentle assurance that he brought to his Sun records."[362] The performance on "In the Ghetto" is, according to Jorgensen, "devoid of any of his characteristic vocal tricks or mannerisms," instead relying on "the astonishing clarity and sensitivity of his voice."[363] Guralnick describes the tenderness in the singing of the same song of "such unassuming, almost translucent eloquence, it is so quietly confident in its simplicity" that one is reminded of the Sun period, "offering equal parts yearning and social compassion."[364] On "Suspicious Minds" from the same sessions Guralnick hears essentially the same "remarkable mixture of tenderness and poise," but supplemented with "an expressive quality somewhere between stoicism (at suspected infidelity) and anguish (over impending loss)."[361]
Music critic Henry Pleasants observes that "Presley has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor. An extraordinary compass ... and a very wide range of vocal color have something to do with this divergence of opinion."[365] He identifies Presley as a high baritone, calculating his range as two octaves and a third, "from the baritone low G to the tenor high B, with an upward extension in falsetto to at least a D-flat. Presley's best octave is in the middle, D-flat to D-flat, granting an extra full step up or down."[365] In Pleasants' view, his voice was "variable and unpredictable" at the bottom, "often brilliant" at the top, with the capacity for "full-voiced high Gs and As that an opera baritone might envy".[365] Scholar Lindsay Waters, who figures Presley's range as 2¼ octaves, emphasizes that "his voice had an emotional range from tender whispers to sighs down to shouts, grunts, grumbles and sheer gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to fear."[366] Presley was always "able to duplicate the open, hoarse, ecstatic, screaming, shouting, wailing, reckless sound of the black rhythm-and-blues and gospel singers," writes Pleasants, and also demonstrated a remarkable ability to assimilate many other vocal styles.[365]
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