Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...freed hostages -- ordinary men caught in extraordinary circumstances -- it was the commonplace aspects of daily life that really brought home their sense of freedom. Barczak, through tears, told reporters, "For me, freedom is just being able to do the everyday, ordinary things that you can do in America." Benjamin Zimmermann, the flight engineer aboard the hijacked TWA airliner, simply wanted to be alone with a few friends and relatives. When he arrived in his hometown of Cascade, Idaho, he told a welcoming crowd of more than 1,000, "TWA Flight 847 has finally landed...
That was the day when William Buckley, 57, political officer of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, was abducted from his car. In May 1984 the Rev. Benjamin Weir, 61, a Presbyterian minister who had lived in Beirut for more than 30 years, was seized. Six months later, Peter Kilburn, 60, a librarian at the American University of Beirut, was reported missing...
...Benjamin Viera, 37, a native New Yorker married to a Puerto Rican wife who speaks Spanish around the house, bilingual education used to mean trouble in communicating with his son, now going into eighth grade. Six years ago Viera switched the boy out of a bilingual program and into regular classes. "I'd talk to him in English at home, and he couldn't understand me," complains Viera. "He'd go and ask his mother what I said. His teacher was giving him Spanish all day and very little English...
Those who wished to turn back earlier waves of immigration sometimes used the same language, or worse. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin asked, "Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and, by herding together, establish their language and manners, to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them?" Some 80 years later, Boston Mayor Theodore Lyman called the Irish "a race that will never be infused into our own, but on the contrary...
Leave it to Benjamin Franklin, that protean spinner of projects, to publish the first foreign-language newspaper in America. The year was 1732; the paper, called the Philadelphia Zeitung, was aimed at the city's burgeoning German population. As the decades rolled by, the growth and variety of the immigrant press mirrored the flow of the immigrants themselves. By the early 1900s, when the boatloads of newcomers reached their peak, some 1,300 foreign- language newspapers and magazines were being published in the U.S. New York City alone boasted a cacophony of 32 dailies, including ten in German, five...