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Description: Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Identities and Englishes -- 3 English in Italy -- 4 Attitudes, motivations and proficiencies -- 5 Facilitators and constraints -- 6 Power and paradox: proficiency, accents and selves -- 7 Positioning the researcher -- 8 Reconceptualizing Englishes and English-speaking identities -- 9 Educating English learners today -- Appendix: transcription conventions -- Index
Description: In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.
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Description: This informative and engaging historical novel uniquely turns a complicated study into interesting reading of American history. All the characters are the creation of the author and entirely fictional. The exceptions, of course, are those public figures mentioned by name. This is the saga of a family of Renaissance Florence that had re-awakened the culture of education, ideas, art, and governance with responsibility. The world suddenly opened to exploration and adventure. The book brilliantly intertwines historical fact with gripping fiction—a novel of politics, love, intrigue, and passions that rule human lives while spanning four centuries of a most unusual family deeply and personally involved with the age of discovery of the Western Hemisphere, an unknown mass that encompassed almost half of earth’s land mass to the founding of the United States of America. Picture yourself with Marco Polo and the Emperor of China, or talking with Christopher Columbus in his cabin aboard the Santa Maria sailing an unknown ocean, or observing the remarkable Leonardo da Vinci when he required funds to visit the King of France, or perhaps listening to the discussions in the Court of St. James of plans of King Charles to rid England of undesirables and populate the Land Grants in the new American colonies. Western Civilization is replete with wars with little or no reason, with intrigues where monarchs make momentous decisions with little thought but having enormous unintended consequences, where a storm is able to change the course of history and the reader becomes involved in the drama. Almost as the wind changes, history bends and for America, it determines its language. ‘
Description: This book is a cultural-historical (rather than purely linguistic) introduction to American English. The first part consists of a general account of variation in American English. It offers concise but comprehensive coverage of such topics as the history of American English; regional, social and ethnic variation; variation in style (including slang); and British and American differences. The second part of the book puts forward an account of how American English has developed into a dominant variety of the English language. It focuses on the ways in which intellectual traditions such as puritanism and republicanism, in shaping the American world view, have also contributed to the distinctiveness of American English.