The Dictionary Wars
The Dictionary Wars

Author: Peter Martin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0691210179

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Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.

Stone Breaker
Stone Breaker

Author: Kathleen L. Housley

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2023-03-01

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0819500291

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Stone Breaker is an in-depth, accessible biography of a true American polymath, James Gates Percival. A poet, linguist, and unstable savant Percival was also a brilliant geologist who walked thousands of miles crisscrossing first Connecticut and then Wisconsin to lay the foundation for the work of generations of Earth scientists. Exploring the confluences of literature, art, and geology, Kathleen L. Housley reveals how one of most famous poets of the 1820's became a renowned geologist with his groundbreaking 1843 work Report on the Geology of the State of Connecticut. The book includes historic photographs and paintings of the Connecticut landscape.