文章背景介绍

●Author

Dale Breckenridge Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills.

Born into poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People （中译《人性的弱点》1936）, a massive bestseller that remains popular today. He also wrote How to Stop Worrying and Start Living （中译《人性的优点》1948 ）, Lincoln the Unknown (1932), and several other books.

One of the core ideas in his books is that it is possible to change other people's behavior by changing one's behavior toward them.

1.Quotations by Author

2.Books of author

3.Early life of author

Growing up on a farm, Dale experienced occasional hardships due to the flooding. He grew up feeling ashamed of his family's poverty, but always admired his mother's strong faith and father’s perseverance. His mother often gave to charity, even though the family itself was in need of charity.

In 1904 Dale attended the teacher's college free of tuition. He rode to the college on horseback and came home to do farm chores. Dale asked a girl student to go out on a buggy ride with him, but was turned down. He was convinced that this was due to his poverty and swore to himself that he would become rich and famous, a vow he kept.

America was then entering a boom period, and salesmen were in demand. He got his first job after college to sell correspondence courses, however, he only made one sale and began to question his sales approach and quit.

●Duel

To fight a duel, whether with swords or pistols, remains one of the most romantic and violent tropes of the 17th through the 19th centuries, from Alexandre Dumas’ D'artagnan to the Firefly episode. Starting in the Middle Ages, European nobles had defended their honor in man-to-man battles. An early version of dueling was known as “judicial combat”, so called because God allegedly judged the man in the right and let him win.

Dueling in the US: the former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel against the Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804. Between 1798 and the Civil War, the US Navy lost two-thirds as many officers to dueling as it did in combat at sea. Despite prominent deaths, dueling persisted because of contemporary ideals of chivalry, particularly in the South, and because of the threat of ridicule if a challenge was rejected. The duel at high noon is a stereotypical aspect of a gunfighter story in the American Western film genre.

●Battle of Gettysburg

The battle, described as the American Civil War's turning point, was fought over three hot summer days, July 1-3, 1863 at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania between Union and Confederate forces. Before the battle, major cities in the North such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington were under threat of attack from Confederate Army. It began as a skirmish but by its end involved 160,000 Americans, leaving the largest number of casualties of the entire war. Union General George Meade's Army of the Potomac defeated attacks by invincible Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, ending Lee's invasion of the North.

On Nov. 19, President Lincoln used the dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor the fallen Union soldiers and redefine the purpose of the war in his historic Gettysburg Address of two minutes, surprising many in the audience by its shortness. Over time, however, the speech and its words — government of the People, by the People, for the People — have come to symbolize the definition of democracy itself.

●Test pilot & Bob Hoover

In the 1950s, test pilots were being killed at the rate of about one a week, but the risks have shrunk to a fraction of that, thanks to the maturation of aircraft technology, better ground-testing and simulation of aircraft performance, fly by wire technology and lately, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to test experimental aircraft features. Still, piloting experimental aircraft remains more dangerous than most other types of flying.

Robert A. "Bob" Hoover (1922 — ) is a former air show pilot and US Air Force test pilot, known for his wide-brimmed straw hat and wide smile. In aviation circles, he is often referred to as “The pilots' pilot.”

1.Mark Twain

1.Mark Twain on English spelling

Mark Twain said, "I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling...”

“I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me, there is such a breezy unfettered originality about his orthography.

2.Mark Twain — Mirror of America

Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn's idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer's endless summer of freedom and adventure. Indeed, this nation's best-loved author was every bit as adventurous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain as well — one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsessed with the frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night…

On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life's regularities and the energy-sapping clamor for success. (by Noel Grove from National Geographic, Sept., 1975)

3.Twain’s comment upon Chinese:

Twain was an adamant supporter of the abolition of slavery and emancipation of slaves, even going so far to say "Lincoln's Proclamation ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also." He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States, once saying "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature... but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him."