A colorful compendium of everyday words and phrases and where they originated. The English language is a treasury of splendid mysteries, among them the many words and phrases whose origins we no longer know. Often the original meaning was literal, pertaining to forgotten objects or activities—such as "aftermath," which once meant the grass that sprang up after a farmer had mowed a field. With the informal scholarship and good-humored wit that are his trademarks, Robert Claiborne reveals the wonders buried in our speech, vivid images of people and customs of the past. As the reader soon discovers, they are "a sort of hidden poetry that can heighten the colors and sharpen the meanings of words and phrases that we read or write daily.
Robert Claiborne gives readers a short history of the English language to show how most of the words we use today evolved from a single taproot language called Indo-European. This book is a must for all word buffs and language lovers; an intelligent and uniquely accessible examination of our vocabulary by a recognized authority.
Scouting Our Way celebrates a century of the Boy Scouts of America's rich, faith-based heritage. It embraces the spirit of Scouting and renews the religious bedrock of Lord Robert S.S. Baden-Powell's pioneering experiment in shaping good character in youth and preparing them to do their best. His founding moral principles and ideals embodied in the Boy Scouts of America's Oath and Law are brilliantly illuminated in the book through prayers and devotions from over thirty religions and denominations. Scouting Our Way includes an extraordinary selection of traditional and favorite Scout prayers and devotions arranged by program and activity suitable for personal reflection and group gatherings. There is also a prayer journal inside the book for Scouts to record their personal and favorite prayers. At the end of each chapter are Set My Compass interactive, theme-based adventures where the reader can engage with unique chapter topics through faith-building activities. Each Set My Compass exercise is an enlightening, personal, and sharing experience for Scouts to appreciate the blessings and value of reverence, duty, and fellowship. These chapter tasks are readily adaptable for age and program and are an ideal complement to earning advancement, service or religious honors requiring an understanding and the role of a Scout's duty to God. Scouting Our Way also features a journey of prayer in America from the country's foremost leaders and personalities during landmark events in our nation's history. Included, as well, are inspiring words from the presidents of the United States opening with Theodore Roosevelt to the current chief of state speaking on the importance of religious diversity and fellowship among all citizens in building this great nation. Scouting Our Way is distinctive in the body of published works on religious diversity and interfaith understanding. It is an indispensable resource for meditation and spiritual growth. Scouts, leaders, parents, teachers, and mentors will also find it essential for use at meetings, outings, ceremonies, and special events where people of one or many faiths come together to celebrate the spirit and adventure of Scouting.
In hundreds of dictionary-type entries, ranging from "Acronyms" to "Y'know," the author of "Our Marvellous Native Tongue" insists on clarity as the touchstone of good usage
The premier secessionist of antebellum Mississippi, John A. Quitman was one of the half-dozen or so most prominent radicals in the entire South. In this full-length biography, Robert E. May takes issue with the recent tendency to portray secessionists as rabble-rousing, maladjusted outsiders bent on the glories of separate nationhood. May reveals Quitman to have been an ambitious but relatively stable insider who reluctantly advocated secession because of a despondency over slavery’s long-range future in the Union and a related conviction that northerners no longer respected southern claims to equality as American citizens. A fervent disciple of South Carolina “radical” John C. Calhoun’s nullification theories, Quitman also gained notoriety as his region’s most strident slavery imperialist. He articulated the case for new slaver territory, participated in the Texas Revolution, won national acclaim as a volunteer general in the Mexican War, and organized a private military—or “filibustering”—expedition with the intent of liberating Cuba from Spanish rule and making the island a new slave state. In 1850, while governor of Mississippi during the California crisis, Quitman wielded his influence in a vain attempt to induce Mississippi secession. Later, in Congress, he marked out an extreme southern position on Kansas. Mississippi’s most vehement “fire-eater,” Quitman played a significant role in the North-South estrangement that led to the American Civil War. The first critical biography of this important figure, May’s study sheds light on such current historical controversies as whether antebellum southerners were peculiarly militaristic or “antibourgeois” and helps illuminate the slave-master relations, mobility, intraregional class and geographic friction, partisan politics, and family customs of the Old South.
Originally inhabited by Native American tribes, territorial Mississippi has a complex history rife with fierce contention. Since 1540, when Hernando de Soto of Spain journeyed across the Atlantic and became the first European to stumble across its borders, the territory has been the center of passionate international disagreements. After numerous boundary shifts, Mississippi was finally admitted as the twentieth state of the Union on December 10, 1817. In The Mississippi Territory and the Southwest Frontier, 1795–1817, Robert V. Haynes does more than recount history; he explores the political and diplomatic situations that led to the formation and expansion of the Mississippi Territory. Extensively researched and exceptionally written, Haynes details critical events in Mississippi’s rich history, such as ongoing border violence, the arrest of infamous traitor Aaron Burr, and the bloody Creek War.
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