In the minds of many, black street speech—the urban dialect of black Americans—bespeaks illiteracy, poverty, and ignorance. John Baugh challenges those prejudices in this brilliant new inquiry into the history, linguistic structure, and survival within white society of black street speech. In doing so, he successfully integrates a scholarly respect for black English with a humanistic approach to language differences that weds rigor of research with a keen sense of social responsibility.
Baugh's is the first book on black English that is based on a long-term study of adult speakers. Beginning in 1972, black men and women in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, and Houston were repeatedly interviewed, in varied social settings, in order to determine the nature of their linguistic styles and the social circumstances where subtle changes in their speech appear. Baugh's work uncovered a far wider breadth of speaking styles among black Americans than among standard English speakers. Having detailed his findings, he explores their serious implications for the employability and education of black Americans.
Black Street Speech is a work of enduring importance for educators, linguists, sociologists, scholars of black and urban studies, and all concerned with black English and its social consequences.
Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling the creation of some of the most memorable poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, and a host of others. A protean meter, blank verse lends itself to lyric, dramatic, narrative, and meditative modes; to epigram as well as to epic. Blank Verse is the first book since 1895 to offer a detailed study of the meter’s technical features and its history, as well as its many uses. Robert B. Shaw gives ample space and emphasis to the achievements of modern and postmodern poets working in the form, an area neglected until now by scholarship.
With its compact but inclusive survey of more than four centuries of poetry, Blank Verse is filled with practical advice for poets of our own day who may wish to attempt the form or enhance their mastery of it. Enriched with numerous examples, Shaw’s discussions of verse technique are lively and accessible, inviting not only to apprentice poets but to all readers of poetry.
Shaw’s approach should reassure those who find prosody intimidating, while encouraging specialists to think more broadly about how traditional poetic forms can be taught, learned, practiced, and appreciated in the twenty-first century. Besides filling a conspicuous gap in literary history, Blank Verse points the way ahead for poets interested in exploring blank verse and its multitude of uses.
A New Edition of One of the Great Military Treatises of the Nineteenth Century
First published in 1853, Cavalry: Its History and Tactics had a major impact on military theorists and officers for decades—it was reprinted as a manual during the American Civil War—and its influence on European cavalry performance can be traced into World War I. It is an intelligent work which discusses the history and development of cavalry over the ages, advocates a program of reform for Britain’s horsed troops, and covers many aspects of equipment, training, drill, organization, formation, and battlefield tactics. The author, an experienced and gifted cavalryman, first served in the Austrian army, then joined the British army’s 15th Hussars in 1839, fought in India, and became the regimental riding master. Captain Nolan’s 1852 tour of European armies, wide reading in many languages, and service in Europe and India makes Cavalry an extraordinary statement on mid-nineteenth-century theory and practice.
As historian Jon Coulston explains in his introduction, Nolan was writing at the cusp of technological change, drawing upon the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars, continental suppression of the 1848 Revolutions, and Britain’s wars in India, but with an eye to firepower developments on the eve of the Crimean War. In 1854, at the Battle of Balaklava, Nolan rode with the written order which unleashed the Charge of the Light Brigade, an action in which he lost his life. Presented here as the first modern reprint, complete with a new introduction and further reading, Nolan’s Cavalry remains a hallmark of military history.
Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal.
“Penetrating and sprightly…Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive…Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity…[Rosen] is in general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.”
—Samuel Moyn, The Nation
“[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.”
—Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education
“Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.”
—Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement
Black ASL has long been recognized as a distinct variety of American Sign Language based on abundant anecdotal evidence. The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL, originally published in 2011, presents the first sociohistorical and linguistic study of this language variety. Based on the findings of the Black ASL Project, which undertook this unprecedented research, Hidden Treasure documents the stories and language of the African American Deaf community. With links to online supplemental video content that includes interviews with Black ASL users (formerly on DVD), this volume is a groundbreaking scholarly contribution and a powerful affirmation for Black Deaf people.
This paperback edition includes an updated foreword by Glenn B. Anderson, a new preface that reflects on the impact of this research, and an expanded list of references and resources on Black ASL.
The supplemental video content is available online at the Gallaudet University Press YouTube Channel. Under Playlists, click “The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Companion Video to the Book.” The original Black ASL Project research videos are also available.
Featured in the film Signing Black in America: The Story of Black ASL, produced by The Language and Life Project at North Carolina State University (Dr. Walt Wolfram, Executive Producer). Look for it on PBS.
This volume is the 1997 Annual Supplement to the journal History of Political Economy. All 1997 subscribers will receive a copy of this book as part of their annual subscription.
Contributors. Timothy L. Alborn, Marcel Boumans, Joshua Cohen, John B. Davis, Ross B. Emmett, Paul Harrison, Daniel M. Hausman, Mary L. Hirschfeld, S. Todd Lowry, Steven G. Medema, Philip Mirowski, Philippe Mongin, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, Esther-Mirjam Sent
Rediscovering Northwest Denver is a chatty, enjoyable read that tells of the tycoons and entrepreneurs whose fine Victorian homes still dot the area, and of the immigrants from various European cultures who clung together for comfort in the face of prejudice. It includes maps, photographs, past and present street names, a bibliography, index, and suggested tours. Northwest Denver today is typified by traditions, beauty, and pride, all of which the author captures in this ever-popular book.
Winner of the 1993 Hubert Humphrey Award for the book's contribution to the historical appreciation and preservation of Northwest Denver.
A favorite destination of visitors to the Texas coast, Corpus Christi is a midsize city that manages to be both cosmopolitan and provincial, networked and local. It is an indispensable provider of urban services to South Texas, as well as a port of international significance. Its industries and military bases and, increasingly, its coastal research institutes give it a range of connections throughout North America. Despite these advantages, however, Corpus Christi has never made it into the first rank of Texas cities, and a keen self-consciousness about the city’s subordinate position has driven debates over Corpus’s identity and prospects for decades.
In this masterful urban history—a study that will reshape the way that Texans look at all their cities—Alan Lessoff analyzes Corpus Christi’s place within Texas, the American Southwest, the western Gulf of Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands from the city’s founding in 1839 to the present. He portrays Corpus as a place where westward Anglo expansion overwhelmed the Hispanic settlement process from the south, leaving a legacy of conflicting historical narratives that colors the city’s character even now. Lessoff also explores how competing visions of the city’s identity and possibilities have played out in arenas ranging from artwork in public places to schemes to embellish, redevelop, or preserve the downtown waterfront and North Padre Island. With a deep understanding of the geographic, historical, economic, and political factors that have formed the city, Lessoff demonstrates that Corpus Christi exemplifies the tensions between regional and cosmopolitan influences that have shaped cities across the Southwest.
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