A Separate Place

A Separate Place

Author: Warren R. Hofstra

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780945612704

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The origins of Clarke County, Virginia go back more than 250 years to the men and women who first settled in Shenandoah Valley and left their imprint upon the land. When, in the early 1830s, the people in one portion of old Frederick County moved to establish their own county, they were seeking to maintain the way of life they had inherited from this earlier generation. At the same time, they were acting in concert with contemporary forces that had a statewide, and in some ways national, significance. The origins of Clarke County--how it came to be, and why--are examined here for the first time. Warren R. Hofstra not only tells the story of the people who made Clarke County a separate place but also puts the movement for its formation in the context of Virginia and U.S. politics. It is a story fascinating in detail and rich in implication, for the issues that strained old Frederick to the breaking point--local control vs. an expanded federal government, conformity vs. pluralism, agrarian values vs. commercial pursuits--are still featured in the political debates today both regionally and nationally.


Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States

Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States

Author: William A. Kretzschmar

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1993-09-15

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780226452838

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Who uses "skeeter hawk," "snake doctor," and "dragonfly" to refer to the same insect? Who says "gum band" instead of "rubber band"? The answers can be found in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), the largest single survey of regional and social differences in spoken American English. It covers the region from New York state to northern Florida and from the coastline to the borders of Ohio and Kentucky. Through interviews with nearly twelve hundred people conducted during the 1930s and 1940s, the LAMSAS mapped regional variations in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation at a time when population movements were more limited than they are today, thus providing a unique look at the correspondence of language and settlement patterns. This handbook is an essential guide to the LAMSAS project, laying out its history and describing its scope and methodology. In addition, the handbook reveals biographical information about the informants and social histories of the communities in which they lived, including primary settlement areas of the original colonies. Dialectologists will rely on it for understanding the LAMSAS, and historians will find it valuable for its original historical research. Since much of the LAMSAS questionnaire concerns rural terms, the data collected from the interviews can pinpoint such language differences as those between areas of plantation and small-farm agriculture. For example, LAMSAS reveals that two waves of settlement through the Appalachians created two distinct speech types. Settlers coming into Georgia and other parts of the Upper South through the Shenandoah Valley and on to the western side of the mountain range had a Pennsylvania-influenced dialect, and were typically small farmers. Those who settled the Deep South in the rich lowlands and plateaus tended to be plantation farmers from Virginia and the Carolinas who retained the vocabulary and speech patterns of coastal areas. With these revealing findings, the LAMSAS represents a benchmark study of the English language, and this handbook is an indispensable guide to its riches.


Freedom by Degrees

Freedom by Degrees

Author: Gary B. Nash

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991-01-17

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 019802147X

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During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.


The Record

The Record

Author: United States. National Archives and Records Administration

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13:

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