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Names On the Land:a Historical account Of Place-Naming In the United States
[Paperback - 2008]
matt weiland
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Category: History
Additional Category: General History - World History
Publisher: Nyrb Classics | ISBN: 9781590172735 | Pages: 560
Shipping Weight: .561 | Dimensions: 5.16 x 1.17 x 7.96 inches

Description

George R. Stewart’s classic study of place-naming in the United States was written during World War II as a tribute to the varied heritage of the nation’s peoples. More than half a century later, Names on the Land remains the authoritative source on its subject, while Stewart’s intimate knowledge of America and love of anecdote make his book a unique and delightful window on American history and social life.

Names on the Land is a fascinating and fantastically detailed panorama of language in action. Stewart opens with the first European names in what would later be the United States—Ponce de León’s flowery Florída, Cortés’s semi-mythical isle of California, and the red Rio Colorado—before going on to explore New England, New Amsterdam, and New Sweden, the French and the Russian legacies, and the unlikely contributions of everybody from border ruffians to Boston Brahmins. These lively pages examine where and why Indian names were likely to be retained; nineteenth-century fads that gave rise to dozens of Troys and Athens and to suburban Parksides, Brookmonts, and Woodcrest Manors; and deep and enduring mysteries such as why “Arkansas” is Arkansaw, except of course when it isn’t.

Names on the Land will engage anyone who has ever wondered at the curious names scattered across the American map. Stewart’s answer is always a story—one of the countless stories that lie behind the rich and strange diversity of the USA.

About the Author

George Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novelEarth Abides(1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King'sThe Stand.His 1941 novelStorm, featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm calledMaria,prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon."Stormwas dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels,Ordeal by Hunger(1936) andFire(1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work isNames on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States(1945; reprinted,New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names,A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names(1970),Names on the Globe(1975), andAmerican Given Names(1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.His 1959 bookPickett's Chargeis a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.

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