In many countries of the world, people can confidently tell you the meaning of their town or city, but most people who live in Manchester, Oxford or Birmingham would not be able to explain what the name of their city means. The name of every British town and city, however, has a long history.

Two thousand years ago, most people living in Britain were Celts. Even the word “Britain" is Celtic (凯尔特语).Then the Romans arrived and built camps which became cities called “castra". This is why there are so many place names in England which end in "-chester" or “-caster" Manchester, for example.

The Romans never reached Wales or Scotland, and many place names there are Celtic. For example,Welsh place names that begin with “Llan" come from the Celtic word for "church".

After the Romans left Britain, it was attacked by the Anglo-Saxons who were from the area of Europe that is now Germany and Holland. The names of their villages often ended in “-ham" or “-ton". Some got their names from the leader of the village.So Birmingham for example, means "Beormund's village”

The Anglo-Saxons were farmers and the landscape was very important to them, so we have villages called Upton (village on a hill)——a good place to build a village and Moreton (“village by a lake”)where floods could make life hard. Place names that end in “-ford" (a place where you could cross a river) also describe the location of Anglo-Saxon villages.

Finally, in 1066 England became Norman—the Normans gave us the place name "grange", which means farm.

And how about London? Experts cannot agree. The Romans called the city Londinium, but they were not the first inhabitants (居民). People once believed that the United Kingdom’s capital city got its name from the castle of a King called Lud   but this is very unlikely. Our best guess today is that the name comes from a Celtic word meaning a fast-flowing river. Like a number of British place names, its history is lost in time.

The Great Migration

The Great Migration began when the North had a labor problem. The North had been relying on cheap labor from Europe — immigrants from Europe — to work the factories and the foundries and the steel mills. 【小题1】 As a result, the North decided to go and find the cheapest labor in the land, which meant many of African Americans in the South were not even being paid for their hard work. Many were sharecroppers (佃农) working for the right to live on the land that they were farming.

But it turned out that the South did not take kindly to this poaching (盗用，挖走) of its cheap labor. 【小题2】 They would arrest people from the railroad platforms and from their train seats. And when there were too many people to arrest, they would wave the train on through so that people who had been hoping and saving and praying for the chance to get to freedom had to figure out: How now will we get out?

Before the Great Migration began, 90 percent of all African Americans were living in the South, where they were nearly held captive. But by the time this Great Migration was over, nearly half were living all over the rest of the country. 【小题3】

This Great Migration was the first time in American history that the lowest caste (种姓) people signaled that they had options for themselves and were willing to take them. 【小题4】 Think about those cotton fields, rice plantations, tobacco fields and sugar plantations, where there were opera singers, jazz musicians, playwrights, novelists, surgeons, attorneys, accountants, professors, journalists. And how do we know that? We know that because that is what they and their children and now their grandchildren and even great-grandchildren have often chosen to become once they had the chance to choose for themselves what they would do with their God-given talents.