Të gjitha përkthimet

Like all Englishmen, the colonists were familiar with written documents as barriers to encroaching power. “Anxious to preserve and transmit” their liberties “unimpaired to posterity”, the English people had repeatedly “caused them to be reduced to writing, and in the most solemn manner to be recognized, ratified and confirmed,” first by king John., then Henry III and Edward I, and “afterwards by a multitude of corroborating acts, reckoned in all, by Lord Cook, to be thirty-two, from Edw.1st to Henry 4th, and since, in a variety of instances, by the bills of right and acts of settlement.” Moreover, America’s own past was filled with written charters to which the colonists had continually appealed in imperial disputes-charters or grants from the Crown which by the time of the Revolution had taken on an extraordinary importance in American eyes.

Back in the seventeenth century the Americans’ ancestors in each colony “either before, or soon after their emigration, entered into particular compacts with the Kings of England,” involving their several forms of government which were, “by charters, royal proclamations, and the laws and regulations in each colony…made by the mutual consent of the King and the People.” These charters were not franchises or grants from the Crown that could be unilaterally recalled of forfeited, as the Tories claimed: “Their running in the stile of a grant is mere matter of form and not of substance.”

When there where no newspapers and few letters, and when travel was difficult and dangerous, the King’s rigid insistence on the perpetual coming and going of ever fresh troops of knights and burghers between Westminster and their own communities began the continuous political education of Englishmen, and perhaps did more to create the unity of the nation that Chaucer or the Hundred Years’ War. Nor, without such machinery for the easy levy of taxes, could the great Scottish or French wars of the Edwardian period have been fought.

Feudalism, dependence on a local magnate, had been superseded by nationalism, loyalty to the king and his central government, not only in E., but to some degree in F., S. and P. (G. and I. were to wait nearly another four centuries), and while H. was consolidating his power, C. was planting the Spanish flag in A., and Portuguese adventurers were doubling the Cape of Good Hope on their way to I. The little medieval world of Western Europe, of which E. had been the unprofitable fringe, was expanding into a globe on which she was a promontory thrust out towards a New World.

The enduring mystery of the Anasazi

Time-worn pueblos and dramatic „cliff towns” set amid the stark, rugged mesas and canyons of C. and N.M., mark the settlements of some of the earliest inhabitants of North America, the Anasazi (a Navajo word meaning „ancient ones”).

Artisans such as cabinetmakers had long been employed to produce, say, bedsteads, at so much per bed, and printers had been paid so much per pica of type set at least since the eighteenth century.

Wir ham erfahr'n,
dass man heut' vor ein paar Jahr'n
den Zeitpunkt günstig fand
und dich kurzerhand entband.
Seitdem bist du auf der Welt.
Schön, dass es dir hier gefällt.
Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!

Wir wünschen Dir, dass lauter nette Leute
ganz besonders heute
ganz in deiner Nähe sind,
und dass sie dir vielleicht sogar was schenken,
und dass sie an dich denken,
denn du bist das Geburtstagskind.

Wir wünschen dir im neuen Lebensjahr,
dass das, was gut ist, bleibt, so wie es war,
und dass alles, was dich nervt,
sich zumindest nicht verschärft.

Wir wünschen dir, dass du an jedem Morgen
fröhlich, ohne Sorgen,
deinen neuen Tag beginnst,
und dass du zwar höchstwahrscheinlich nie
die Fernsehlotterie,
doch manchen neuen Freund gewinnst.

Wir wünschen dir im Sommer Sonnenschein,
im Winter soll es ohne Ende schnei'n,
und dass du, je nach dem, wie's ist,
passend angezogen bist!

Und dass viele Leute dich besuchen
und dir leck'ren Kuchen
bringen. Ja, das wär' uns Recht!
Wir hoffen, du sagst: „Heute ist ein Tag
ganz genau, wie ich ihn mag –
Geburtstag haben ist nicht schlecht!“

Und dass du auch in Zukunft ganz ohne Beschwerden
Freude hast am gepflegten Älterwerden.
Also, kurz gesagt – und darum sind wir hier - :
Wir gratulieren dir!

Although the medieval state was by no means a welfare state, at least manor and guild were in some sort responsible for their members, but medieval collectivism was now giving place to individualism.
Moreover, the old nobility had almost destroyed itself in thirty years of internecine war –there was only one duke left at the end of H.’s reign – and the lord of the manor was now typically a country gentleman and justice of peace living quietly on the outskirts of a village in an unfortified manor house. In any event the new invention of gunpowder made fortifications almost as useless as the plate armour worn by knights in the late wars, and the king was the only man who could afford a train of cannon.