Il y a plus de deux cent cinquante ans, à la place de New-York, on voyait une île, des collines, un marais. Des peuplades indiennes, les Lenni-Lenape et les Manhattans, allumaient leurs feux et construisaient leurs buttes sur ces rivages. Un navigateur Anglais au service de la Hollande, qui cherchait un passage par les mers polaires vers la Chine, Henry Hudson, vit en 1609 ces Indiens, et il leur donna des souliers, qu'ils pendirent à leur cou en guise d'ornements. Sur l'emplacement actuel de Broadway, quelques Hollandais s'établirent avec Christiansen, en 1614, pour faire le trafic des fourrures, et ils construisirent quatre maisons en bois et un petit navire, le Restkess (sans repos), nom qui convenait si bien aux destinées futures de ce coin du monde. Un fort, une église, trois moulins à vent, cent vingt maisons et 1.000 habitants, qui font paître leurs vaches dans les prairies maintenant occupées par des palais, voilà quelle était la nouvelle Amsterdam en 1654 sous le gouverneur Stuyvesant, lorsque le Nicholls, envoyé par le duc d'York, auquel Charles II avait cédé ce territoire, s'en empare avec 400 hommes, appelle le fort Fort-James, la ville New-York, et substitue à la petite municipalité élue un maire, quatre aldermen et un shérif, nommés par le gouverneur. Plus d'un Anglais se crut lésé lorsque la paix de Breda, en 1667, donna aux Hollandais Surinam en échange de New-York.

New York et son histoire

Avant de parvenir à être éclairées chaque soir, nos villes ont longtemps vécu dans les ténèbres. Elles n'en sont sorties qu'avec effort et par une série de tâtonnements qu'il est intéressant de faire connaître.

Il est d'un intérêt supérieur pour la bonne police des villes que les rues soient éclairées pendant la nuit, afin qu'on puisse y circuler sans peine, et que les gens de mauvais aloi y soient surveillés. L'idée si simple d'allumer des lanternes ou des flambeaux pour combattre l'intensité des ténèbres et répandre quelque clarté sur la voie publique est relativement moderne...

Histoire de l’éclairage des villes - Paris, Londres et Berlin

It is now four or five years since my attention was called to the collection of native American ballads from the Southwest, already begun by Professor Lomax. At that time, he seemed hardly to appreciate their full value and importance. To my colleague, Professor G. L. Kittredge, probably the most eminent authority on folk-song in America, this value and importance appeared as indubitable as it appeared to me. We heartily joined in encouraging the work, as a real contribution both to literature and to learning. The present volume is the first published result of these efforts.

The value and importance of the work seems to me double. One phase of it is perhaps too highly special ever to be popular. Whoever has begun the inexhaustibly fascinating study of popular song and literature-of the nameless poetry which vigorously lives through the centuries-must be perplexed by the necessarily conjectural opinions concerning its origin and development held by various and disputing scholars. When songs were made in times and terms which for centuries have been not living facts but facts of remote history or tradition, it is impossible to be sure quite how they begun, and by quite what means they sifted through the centuries into the forms at last securely theirs, in the final rigidity of print. In this collection of American ballads, almost if not quite uniquely, it is possible to trace the precise manner in which songs and cycles of song-obviously analogous to those surviving from older and antique times-have come into being. The facts which are still available concerning the ballads of our own Southwest are such as should go far to prove, or to disprove, many of the theories advanced concerning the laws of literature as evinced in the ballads of the old world...

THE DYING COWBOY 

"O bury me not on the lone prairie, "
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of a youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day.

He had wailed in pain till o'er his brow
Death's shadows fast were gathering now;
He thought of his home and his loved ones nigh
As the cowboys gathered to see him die.

"O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where the wild cayotes will howl o'er me,
In a narrow grave just six by three,
O bury me not on the lone prairie.

"In fancy I listen to the well known words
Of the free, wild winds and the song of the birds;
I think of home and the cottage in the bower
And the scenes I loved in my childhood's hour.

"It matters not, I've oft been told,
Where the body lies when the heart grows cold;
Yet grant, Oh grant this wish to me,
O bury me not on the lone prairie.

Some Cowboy Songs and Ballads

A learned Historian of the Christian Theology of the Apostolic age observes that what most distinguishes the Jewish religion, at least in its last centuries, is not so much monotheism as faith in the future. While elsewhere we see the imagination of men complacently retracing the picture of a golden age irrecoverably lost, Israel, guided by its prophets, persisted in turning its eyes towards the future, and attached itself the more firmly to a felicity yet to come, the more the actual situation seemed to give the lie to its hopes.

What these hopes were in relation to the future of that people and of the world, what the Messianic ideas and expectations were, we learn from the New Testament, particularly from the Gospels. And we find our impressions from this source made more clear in some points, and in all confirmed, by a study of the Apocalyptic literature, -of those writings of which it was the object to give both shape and expression to the Hebrew thought of the kingdom of heaven, and of the brilliant and miraculous events which would introduce and establish it...

The Aim and Hope of Jesus - Christianity and Modern Thought

Picasso et les avant-gardes arabes

Comment faire pour être heureux? Voilà la question que presque tout le monde se pose, et dont les réponses varient selon les nombreux ouvrages écrits sur le bonheur. Il n'est pas facile de parvenir à une vie heureuse, disait Sénèque. Il faut, avant tout, déterminer ce qui rend vraiment heureux; ensuite chercher comment l'atteindre. J'ai décidé d'être heureux parce que c'est bon pour la santé », disait Voltaire. Que ne sommes-nous pas prêts à faire pour avoir une meilleure santé physique et mentale? Et si le bonheur y contribue, pourquoi ne pas faire le choix d'être heureux? Comment développer l'art d'être heureux dans un monde où peines et contrariétés n'épargnent personne? S'appuyant sur les travaux de Kant, Sénèque, du baron d'Holbach, ou encore d'Alain, cette réflexion sur le bonheur montre comment parvenir à être heureux en développant un état d'esprit qui transcende les facteurs extérieurs et permet de conquérir le bien-être durable.

Le choix d etre heureux - comment developper le bien-etre durable

Beau livre de photos largement commentées sur le chantier de reconstruction du Bel Espoir, la goélette à trois mâts de l'association du père Jaouen (association d'aide à la réinsertion de jeunes en difficulté par la navigation).

Le bel espoir la reconstruction

The Incas Civilization flourished in 15th century A.D. until its conquest by the Spanish in the 1530s. Their empire extended across western South America. It's described as the largest empire ever seen in the Americas and the largest in the world at that period... 
"The proofs that the Incas had a real system of astronomy are scattered, partly in what remains of the monuments that were consecrated to the sun, and partly in the accounts of historians - accounts which, whether because their importance has not been suspected, or because of the difficulty of quoting them, most of them having been printed only once, others having remained in the state of manuscript, and very few of them having been translated, are but little known to men of science. Whatever the verity of the legends preserved in these accounts, we find a comparatively highly developed astronomical system among the Incas, of which the most interesting parts are here given from rare documents already published, and from American manuscripts and traditions. The work has not before been done so completely..."

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