Just before the first of the year, a congressman asked the president if he still planned to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

VOA: special.2009.10.08

ong before the first Europeans arrived in the New World, a strange looking animal lived on the rich grasses of the western plains.

VOA: special.2009.02.15

After all,the Confederate secretary of war had declared that the Confederate flag would fly over the Capitol building before the first of May.

VOA: special.2009.08.20

The world's top golfer met with reporters Monday before the first major tournament of the year.

VOA: special.2010.04.10

They are the Navajo - whose ancestors walked that land at least a century, perhaps many centuries, before the first Europeans arrived.

VOA: standard.2010.03.22

The upsurge in violence came a day before the first anniversary of the Gaza War,in which more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

VOA: standard.2009.12.26

Before the first round of voting, opinion polls had placed Komorowksi firmly in the lead.

VOA: standard.2010.07.03

Just before sunrise on April twelfth, eighteen sixty-one, the first shot was fired in the American Civil War.

VOA: special.2009.08.13

The year before,he first played with the United States National Team in a victory over Costa Rica.

VOA: special.2010.06.02

But before NASA could send an astronaut into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first person to travel in space.

VOA: special.2009.06.17

Another man in Seattle,Washington writes about his familys terrible experience fleeing first from China, then from Cambodia and Vietnam before arriving in the United States.

VOA: special.2010.03.03

So "Luck" was the name they chose for him, adding before it,the first name "Tommy."

VOA: special.2009.06.06

The task before me is greater than that which rested upon our first president.

VOA: special.2009.07.23

The first -- Abraham Lincoln -- had been shot just sixteen years before.

VOA: special.2010.04.22